Quantitative Morphology of Galactic Cirrus in Deep Optical Imaging

Abstract

Imaging of optical Galactic cirrus, the spatially resolved form of diffuse Galactic light, provides important insights into the properties of the diffuse interstellar medium (ISM) in the Milky Way. While previous investigations have focused mainly on the intensity characteristics of optical cirrus, their morphological properties remain largely unexplored. In this study, we employ several complementary statistical approaches -- local intensity statistics, angular power spectrum / $\Delta$-variance analysis, and wavelet scattering transform analysis -- to characterize the morphology of cirrus in deep optical imaging data. We place our investigation of optical cirrus into a multi-wavelength context by comparing the morphology of cirrus seen with the Dragonfly Telephoto Array to that seen with space-based facilities working at longer wavelengths (Herschel 250 $\mu m$, WISE 12 $\mu m$, and Planck radiance), as well as with structures seen in the DHIGLS HI column density map. Our statistical methods quantify the similarities and the differences of cirrus morphology in all these datasets. The morphology of cirrus at visible wavelengths resembles that of far-infrared cirrus more closely than that of mid-infrared cirrus; on small scales, anisotropies in the cosmic infrared background and systematics may lead to differences. Across all dust tracers, cirrus morphology can be well described by a power spectrum with a common power-law index $\gamma \sim -2.9$. We demonstrate quantitatively that optical cirrus exhibits filamentary, coherent structures across a broad range of angular scales. Our results offer promising avenues for linking the analysis of coherent structures in optical cirrus to the underlying physical processes in the ISM that shape them. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these morphological signatures can be leveraged to distinguish and disentangle cirrus from extragalactic light.

31 pages, 28 figures. Accepted for publication in A&A

References in corpus (95)

• Dust Grain Size Distributions and Extinction in the Milky Way, LMC, and SMC
• Interstellar Dust Grains
• The Herschel-SPIRE instrument and its in-flight performance
• Infrared Emission from Interstellar Dust. IV. The Silicate-Graphite-PAH Model in the Post-Spitzer Era
• Overview of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys
• First Results from the TNG50 Simulation: The evolution of stellar and gaseous disks across cosmic time
• Planck 2013 results. XI. All-sky model of thermal dust emission
• Infrared Emission from Interstellar Dust. I. Stochastic Heating of Small Grains
• New Interstellar Dust Models Consistent with Extinction, Emission, and Abundance Constraints
• Scattering by Interstellar Dust Grains: Optical and Ultraviolet
• The Evolution of the Elemental Abundances in the Gas and Dust Phases of the Galaxy
• Empirical Color Transformations Between SDSS Photometry and Other Photometric Systems
• A New Approach to Galaxy Morphology: I. Analysis of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Early Data Release
• The global dust SED: Tracing the nature and evolution of dust with DustEM
• Density probability distribution in one-dimensional polytropic gas dynamics
• Turbulent molecular clouds
• Density Fluctuations in MHD Turbulence: Spectra, Intermittency and Topology
• A Compendium of Distances to Molecular Clouds in the Star Formation Handbook
• Ultra Low Surface Brightness Imaging with the Dragonfly Telephoto Array
• Planck Early Results XXIV: Dust in the diffuse interstellar medium and the Galactic halo
• Planck 2018 results. XI. Polarized dust foregrounds
• Density Studies of MHD Interstellar Turbulence: Statistical Moments, Correlations and Bispectrum
• The Burrell Schmidt Deep Virgo Survey: Tidal Debris, Galaxy Halos, and Diffuse Intracluster Light in the Virgo Cluster
• The COBE Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment Search for the Cosmic Infrared Background: III. Separation of Galactic Emission from the Infrared Sky Brightness
• Planck intermediate results. XVII. Emission of dust in the diffuse interstellar medium from the far-infrared to microwave frequencies
• Beyond 31 mag/arcsec^2: the low surface brightness frontier with the largest optical telescopes
• Xspect, estimation of the angular power spectrum by computing cross-power spectra with analytical error bars
• A new approach to observational cosmology using the scattering transform
• Characterizing Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence in the Small Magellanic Cloud
• HerMES: The Contribution to the Cosmic Infrared Background from Galaxies Selected by Mass and Redshift
• Molecular clouds have power-law probability distribution functions
• Density Power Spectrum of Compressible Hydrodynamic Turbulent Flows
• Galactic cirri in deep optical imaging
• New Spectral Evidence of an Unaccounted Component of the Near-infrared Extragalactic Background Light from the CIBER
• The Spectrum of the Diffuse Galactic Light I: The Milky Way in Scattered Light
• New Interpretable Statistics for Large Scale Structure Analysis and Generation
• Statistical properties of dust far-infrared emission
• Low Surface Brightness Imaging of the Magellanic System: Imprints of Tidal Interactions between the Clouds in the Stellar Periphery
• The Fundamentally Different Dynamics of Dust and Gas in Molecular Clouds
• Power spectrum of the cosmic infrared background at 60 and 100 microns with IRAS
• GHIGLS: HI mapping at intermediate Galactic latitude using the Green Bank Telescope
• The Hi-GAL catalogue of dusty filamentary structures in the Galactic Plane
• The structure of the thermally bistable and turbulent atomic gas in the local interstellar medium
• Census and classification of low-surface-brightness structures in nearby early-type galaxies from the MATLAS survey
• A Full-sky, High-resolution Atlas of Galactic 12 micron Dust Emission with WISE
• Observational Diagnostics of Self-Gravitating MHD Turbulence in Giant Molecular Clouds
• Probing interstellar turbulence in cirrus with deep optical imaging: no sign of energy dissipation at 0.01 pc scale
• Extended Red Emission in High-Galactic Latitude Interstellar Clouds
• Hidden depths in the local Universe: The Stellar Stream Legacy Survey
• Structure analysis of interstellar clouds: I. Improving the Delta-variance method
• Measurement of the Cosmic Optical Background using the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager on New Horizons
• The RWST, a comprehensive statistical description of the non-Gaussian structures in the ISM
• The Dragonfly Wide Field Survey. I. Telescope, Survey Design and Data Characterization
• Euclid: Early Release Observations -- Programme overview and pipeline for compact- and diffuse-emission photometry
• Diffuse Galactic Light in the Field of the Translucent High Galactic Latitude Cloud MBM32
• Systematically Measuring Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies (SMUDGes). II. Expanded Survey Description and the Stripe 82 Catalog
• Classification of Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations using Wavelet Scattering Transforms
• Statistical description of dust polarized emission from the diffuse interstellar medium -- A RWST approach
• Derivation of a large isotropic diffuse sky emission component at 1.25 and 2.2um from the COBE/DIRBE data
• CFHTLenS and RCSLenS Cross-Correlation with Planck Lensing Detected in Fourier and Configuration Space
• DHIGLS: DRAO H I Intermediate Galactic Latitude Survey
• The effect of ambipolar diffusion on low-density molecular ISM filaments
• Tidal Distortions in NGC1052-DF2 and NGC1052-DF4: Independent Evidence for a Lack of Dark Matter
• Direct Estimate of Cirrus Noise in Herschel Hi-GAL Images
• TurbuStat: Turbulence Statistics in Python
• Exploring the cosmic 21-cm signal from the Epoch of Reionisation using the Wavelet Scattering Transform
• Multifractal Analysis of the Interstellar Medium. First application to Hi-GAL Observations
• Euclid: Early Release Observations -- The intracluster light and intracluster globular clusters of the Perseus cluster
• On the origin of M81 group extended dust emission
• Small-scale structure of the galactic cirrus emission
• A new approach for the statistical denoising of Planck interstellar dust polarization data
• Clustering and dynamic decoupling of dust grains in turbulent molecular clouds
• Multi-resolution filtering: an empirical method for isolating faint, extended emission in Dragonfly data and other low resolution images
• A Method To Characterize the Wide-Angle Point Spread Function of Astronomical Images
• On the origin of the North Celestial Pole Loop
• Strategies for optimal sky subtraction in the low surface brightness regime
• Prospects for future studies using deep imaging: Analysis of individual Galactic cirrus filaments
• The Probability Distribution Function of Gas Surface Density in M33
• An Exploration of the Statistical Signatures of Stellar Feedback
• Fractal dimension of optical cirrus in Stripe82
• Probing the cold neutral medium through HI emission morphology with the scattering transform
• Scattering Spectra Models for Physics
• Joint Modelling of Dust Scattering and Thermal Emission: The Spider Complex
• A Recipe for Unbiased Background Modeling in Deep Wide-Field Astronomical Images
• Generative models of astrophysical fields with scattering transforms on the sphere
• Mapping the Thermal Condensation of Diffuse H I in the North Celestial Pole Loop
• Extragalactic Stellar Tidal Streams: Observations meet Simulation
• Structure analysis of simulated molecular clouds with the Delta-variance
• The evolution of the internal structure of massive star forming regions in the Milky Way as revealed by ALMA
• Assessing the Impact of Astrochemistry on Molecular Cloud Turbulence Statistics
• Constraints on galaxy formation from the cosmic-far-infrared-background\,$-$\,optical-imaging cross-correlation using \textit{Herschel} and UNIONS
• Stellar tidal streams around nearby spiral galaxies with deep imaging from amateur telescopes
• Galactic Cirri at High Galactic Latitudes: I. Investigating Scatter in Slopes between Optical and far-Infrared Intensities
• Light and colour of cirrus, translucent and opaque dust in the high-latitude area of LDN 1642
• A New Wavelet Scattering Transform-Based Statistic for Cosmological Analysis of Large-Scale Structure

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Tidal Structures Around Edge-On Galaxies in Deep Imaging Surveys