Spatial distribution of interstellar dust in the Sun vicinity, comparison with neutral sodium-bearing gas

TL;DR

This study constructs 3D maps of interstellar dust and compares them with neutral sodium gas distributions within 250 parsecs, revealing asymmetries in dust and gas ratios near the Sun.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed 3D tomography of local interstellar dust using stellar photometry and compares it with sodium gas distributions, highlighting asymmetries.

Findings

Higher dust opacity in the North at high latitudes

Dust-to-gas ratio asymmetry near the Sun

Good agreement between dust maps and infrared extinction data

Abstract

3D tomography of the interstellar dust and gas may be useful in many respects, from the physical and chemical evolution of the ISM itself to foreground decontamination of the CMB, or various studies of the environments of specific objects. Our goal here is to bring more precise information on the distance to nearby interstellar dust and gas clouds within 250 pc. We apply the best available calibration methods to a carefully screened set of stellar Stromgren photometry data for targets possessing a Hipparcos parallax and spectral type classification. We combine the derived interstellar extinctions and the parallax distances for about 6,000 stars to build a 3D tomography of the local dust. We use an inversion method based on a regularized Bayesian approach and a least squares criterion. We obtain 3D maps of the opacity and the distance to the main dust-bearing clouds with 250 pc. We calculate the integrated extinction between the Sun and the cube boundary and compare with the total galactic extinction derived from infrared 2D maps. We also compare the opacity distribution with the 3D distribution of interstellar neutral sodium resulting from the inversion of sodium columns towards about 1,700 target stars. Our maps show a larger high latitude dust opacity in the North compared to the South, while gas maps do not show the same asymmetry, suggesting a polar asymmetry of the dust to gas ratio at small distances.