Interstellar Extinction

Abstract

Key words: interstellar extinction: reddening: interstellar dust particles: characteristics and properties of the Milky Way galaxy.This review describes our current understanding of interstellar extinction. This differ substantially from the ideas of the 20th century. With infrared surveys of hundreds of millions of stars over the entire sky, such as 2MASS, SPITZER-IRAC, and WISE, we have looked at the densest and most rarefied regions of the interstellar medium at distances of a few kpc from the sun. Observations at infrared and microwave wavelengths, where the bulk of the interstellar dust absorbs and radiates, have brought us closer to an understanding of the distribution of the dust particles on scales of the Galaxy and the Universe. We are in the midst of a scientific revolution in our understanding of the interstellar medium and dust. Progress in, and the key results of, this revolution are still difficult to predict. Nevertheless, (a) a physically justified model has been developed for the spatial distribution of absorbing material over the nearest few kiloparsecs, including the Gould belt as a dust container, which gives an accurate estimate of the extinction for any object just in terms of its galactic coordinates. It is also clear that (b) the interstellar medium makes up roughly half the mass of matter in the galactic vicinity of the solar system (the other half is made up of stars, their remnants, and dark matter) and (c) the interstellar medium and, especially, dust, differ substantially in different regions of space, and deep space cannot be understood by only studying nearby space. *

Interstellar polarization and extinction in the Local Bubble and the Gould Belt

“…Hence, this envelope is elongated between l ≈ 40 • and 250 • and, thus, nearly follows a wide extension of the Local Bubble at low latitudes of the 2 nd and 6 th octants, evident in Fig. 7 (a) and known as the Local interstellar tunnel, or the Great tunnel (Welsh 1991;Gontcharov 2012b). It consists of the Cygnus Cavities, Local Bubble, and CMa tunnel (see LVV, figure 1).…”

Verifying reddening and extinction for Gaia DR1 TGAS giants

“…They intersect at a large angle and near the directions to the Galactic Centre and anticentre. As a result, two parts of the Zodiacal dust belt are projected to the most dense parts of the dust layer of the Gould Belt at l = 345 • , b = 19 • and l = 165 • , b = −19 • (Gontcharov 2012b, table 4), (see also Gontcharov 2009Gontcharov , 2016b. Other parts of the Zodiacal dust belt are projected to the high latitude areas (for example, ecliptic at the longitudes 155 • < λ < 205 • and −25 • < λ < 25 • , i.e.…”

Verifying reddening and extinction for Gaia DR1 TGAS main sequence stars

“…The map is normalized to the E(B − V) reddening (which is cumulative as well) using the color excess of 389 elliptical galaxies with E(B − V) < 0.2 mag assuming the relation (1) and the extinction laws from Cardelli et al (1989) andO'Donnell (1994). A brief review of the main systematic errors of the SFD map with related references can be found in Gontcharov (2016b).…”