Calibrating Milky Way dust extinction using cosmological sources

Abstract

We constrain the light extinction properties of Milky Way dust. We investigated the correlations between dust column density as inferred from infrared data and the observed colours of celestial objects at cosmological distances with low levels of colour dispersion. Results derived using colours of quasars, brightest central galaxies, and luminous red galaxies are broadly consistent, indicating a proportionality constant between the reddening E(B-V)=A_B-A_V and the dust column density D^T (given in units of MJy/sr) of p=E(B-V)/D^T=0.02 and a reddening parameter R_V=A_V/E(B-V)=3 with fractional uncertainties of approximately 10%. The data do not provide any evidence for spatial variations in the dust properties, except for a possible hint of scatter in the dust extinction properties at the longest optical wavelengths.

12 pages, 16 figures. Matches version accepted for publication in A&A

References in corpus (6)

• Measuring Reddening with SDSS Stellar Spectra and Recalibrating SFD
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog IV. Fifth Data Release
• The Blue Tip of the Stellar Locus: Measuring Reddening with the SDSS
• A Correction to the Standard Galactic Reddening Map: Passive Galaxies as Standard Crayons
• Extinction properties of lensing galaxies
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• Flare in the Galactic stellar outer disc detected in SDSS-SEGUE data
• Planck intermediate results. XXXII. The relative orientation between the magnetic field and structures traced by interstellar dust
• SED-dependent Galactic Extinction Prescription for Euclid and Future Cosmological Surveys
• Measuring the Hubble constant with kilonovae using the Expanding Photosphere Method
• The Extinction Properties of and Distance to the Highly Reddened Type Ia Supernova SN 2012cu
• A case against an X-shaped structure in the Milky Way young bulge
• Probing the Progenitors of Type Ia Supernovae using Circumstellar Material Interaction Signatures
• Dust in three dimensions in the Galactic Plane
• Milky Way dust extinction measured with QSOs
• Euclid preparation. XXXI. The effect of the variations in photometric passbands on photometric-redshift accuracy
• Simultaneous Estimation of Large-Scale Structure and Milky Way Dust Extinction from Galaxy Surveys