Putting the Diffuse Interstellar Bands on the map - literally!

Abstract

In a quest to further our understanding of the diffuse interstellar medium (ISM) as well as the unidentified carriers of the diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs), we are mapping DIBs across the sky using hundreds of hot stars as background torches - globular clusters (in particular omega Centauri), nearby stars in and around the Local Bubble, and stars within the Magellanic Clouds. I describe the results so far obtained and our current experiments.

Talk presented at IAU Symposium 297 "The Diffuse Interstellar Bands", CUP proceedings editors: Jan Cami and Nick Cox

References in corpus (6)

• VLT/UVES Observations of Interstellar Molecules and Diffuse Bands in the Magellanic Clouds
• The Spitzer Spectroscopic Survey of the Small Magellanic Cloud (S4MC): Probing the Physical State of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in a Low-Metallicity Environment
• Giants in the globular cluster omega Centauri: dust production, mass loss and distance
• Early-stage young stellar objects in the Small Magellanic Cloud
• Detailed maps of interstellar clouds in front of omega Centauri: Small-scale structures in the Galactic Disc-Halo interface
• A spectral atlas of post-main-sequence stars in omega Centauri: kinematics, evolution, enrichment and interstellar medium