Probing interstellar extinction near the 30 Doradus nebula with red giant stars

Abstract

We have studied the interstellar extinction in a field of 3' x 3' located about 6' SW of 30 Doradus in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Hubble Space Telescope observations in the U, B, V, I and Halpha bands reveal patchy extinction in this field. The colour-magnitude diagram (CMD) shows an elongated stellar sequence, almost parallel to the main sequence (MS), which is in reality made up of stars of the red giant clump (RC) spread across the CMD by the uneven levels of extinction in this region. Since these objects are all at the same distance from us and share very similar physical properties, we can derive quantitatively both the extinction law in the range 3000 - 8000 Angstrom and the absolute extinction towards about 100 objects, setting statistically significant constraints on the dust grains properties in this area. We find an extinction curve considerably flatter than the standard Galactic one and than those obtained before for the LMC. The derived value of Rv = 5.6 +/- 0.3 implies that in this region larger grains dominate. Upper MS stars span a narrower range of E(B-V) values than RC objects, at variance with what has been found elsewhere in the LMC.

16 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS. Version with updated references and higher resolution figures

References in corpus (4)

• An Analysis of the Shapes of Interstellar Extinction Curves. V. The IR-Through-UV Curve Morphology
• New Optical Reddening Maps of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds
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• The VMC survey VII. Reddening map of the 30 Doradus field and the structure of the cold interstellar medium

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• Hubble Tarantula Treasury Project: Unraveling Tarantula's Web. II. Optical and Near Infrared Star Formation History of the Starburst Cluster NGC 2070 in 30 Doradus
• Hubble Tarantula Treasury Project. IV. The extinction law
• The extinction law inside the 30 Doradus nebula
• The Gaia-ESO Survey: age spread in the star forming region NGC6530 from the HR diagram and gravity indicators
• The Small Magellanic Cloud Investigation of Dust and Gas Evolution (SMIDGE): The Dust Extinction Curve from Red Clump Stars
• Photometric determination of the mass accretion rates of pre-main sequence stars. V. Recent star formation in the 30 Dor nebula
• The Cepheid distance to the maser-host galaxy NGC 4258: Studying systematics with the Large Binocular Telescope
• The Optical to Infrared Extinction Law of Magellanic Clouds Based on Red Supergiant and Classical Cepheid
• Extending the extinction law in 30 Doradus to the infrared with JWST
• Photometric determination of the mass accretion rates of pre-main-sequence stars. VIII. Recent star formation in NGC 299
• Extinction in the Large Magellanic Cloud Bar around NGC1854, NGC1856, and NGC1858
• Ultraviolet extinction properties of the 30 Dor Nebula and interpreting observations of starburst clusters
• Anomalous extinction towards NGC 1938
• Measuring Young Stars in Space and Time -- I. The Photometric Catalog and Extinction Properties of N44