Mapping the Interstellar Dust with Near-Infrared Observations: An Optimized Multi-Band Technique

Author(s)

Marco Lombardi, João Alves

Abstract

We generalize Lada et al. (1994) NICE technique to map dust column

density through a molecular cloud to an optimized multi-band technique

that can be applied to any multi-band survey of molecular clouds. We

present a first application to a ˜ 625 deg^2 subset of the Two

Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) data and show that when compared to NICE,

the optimized NICER (i) achieves the same extinction peak values, (ii)

improves the noise variance of the map by a factor of 2 and (iii) is

able to reach 3 σ dust extinction measurements as low as A_V

˜eq 0.5 magnitudes, better than or equivalent to classical optical

star count techniques and below the threshold column density for the

formation of CO.

Organisation(s)

Department of Astrophysics

External organisation(s)

European Southern Observatory (Germany)

Pages

21-28

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1007/10856518_2

Publication date

2002

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

103004 Astrophysics

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