Quantifying Interstellar Extinction at High Galactic Latitudes

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: O'Callaghan, Matthew, Gilmore, Gerry, Mandel, Kaisey S.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author O'Callaghan, Matthew
Gilmore, Gerry
Mandel, Kaisey S.
author_facet O'Callaghan, Matthew
Gilmore, Gerry
Mandel, Kaisey S.
contents A detailed map of the distribution of dust at high Galactic latitudes is essential for future cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization experiments because the dust, while diffuse, remains a significant foreground in these regions. We develop a Bayesian model to identify a region of the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram suited to constrain the single-star extinction accurately at high Galactic latitudes. Using photometry from Gaia, 2MASS and ALLWISE, and parallax from Gaia, we employ nested sampling to fit the model to the data and analyse the posterior over stellar parameters for both synthetic and real data. Charting low variations in extinction is complex due to systematic errors and degeneracies between extinction and other stellar parameters. The systematic errors can be minimised by restricting our data to a region of the HR diagram where the stellar models are most accurate. Moreover, the degeneracies can be reduced by including astrophysical priors and spectroscopic constraints. We show that accounting for the measurement error of the data and the assumed inaccuracies of the stellar models are critical in accurately recovering small variations in extinction. We compare the posterior distribution for individual stars with spectroscopic stellar parameter estimates from LAMOST and Gaia ESO and illustrate the importance of estimating extinction and effective temperature as a joint solution.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_03199
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Quantifying Interstellar Extinction at High Galactic Latitudes
O'Callaghan, Matthew
Gilmore, Gerry
Mandel, Kaisey S.
Astrophysics of Galaxies
A detailed map of the distribution of dust at high Galactic latitudes is essential for future cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization experiments because the dust, while diffuse, remains a significant foreground in these regions. We develop a Bayesian model to identify a region of the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram suited to constrain the single-star extinction accurately at high Galactic latitudes. Using photometry from Gaia, 2MASS and ALLWISE, and parallax from Gaia, we employ nested sampling to fit the model to the data and analyse the posterior over stellar parameters for both synthetic and real data. Charting low variations in extinction is complex due to systematic errors and degeneracies between extinction and other stellar parameters. The systematic errors can be minimised by restricting our data to a region of the HR diagram where the stellar models are most accurate. Moreover, the degeneracies can be reduced by including astrophysical priors and spectroscopic constraints. We show that accounting for the measurement error of the data and the assumed inaccuracies of the stellar models are critical in accurately recovering small variations in extinction. We compare the posterior distribution for individual stars with spectroscopic stellar parameter estimates from LAMOST and Gaia ESO and illustrate the importance of estimating extinction and effective temperature as a joint solution.
title Quantifying Interstellar Extinction at High Galactic Latitudes
topic Astrophysics of Galaxies
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.03199