The meaning of WISE colours - I. The Galaxy and its satellites
Robert Nikutta, Nicholas Hunt-Walker, Maia Nenkova, Zeljko Ivezic,, Moshe Elitzur

TL;DR
This paper uses WISE infrared data to classify and map various stellar populations in our Galaxy and nearby satellites, revealing spatial distributions and dust properties of evolved stars and other objects.
Contribution
It develops WISE-based criteria to identify and distinguish AGB star types and creates all-sky maps showing their distribution and dust shell characteristics.
Findings
WISE colours effectively separate Galactic and extragalactic sources.
The C:O ratio of dusty AGB stars increases with distance from the LMC center.
Dust shell properties explain the segregation of object classes in WISE colour space.
Abstract
Through matches with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) catalogue we identify the location of various families of astronomical objects in WISE colour space. We identify reliable indicators that separate Galactic/local from extragalactic sources and concentrate here on the objects in our Galaxy and its closest satellites. We develop colour and magnitude criteria that are based only on WISE data to select asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars with circumstellar dust shells, and separate them into O-rich and C-rich classes. With these criteria we produce an all-sky map for the count ratio of the two populations. The map reveals differences between the Galactic disc, the Magellanic Clouds and the Sgr Dwarf Spheroidal galaxy, as well as a radial gradient in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) disc. We find that the C:O number ratio for dusty AGB stars increases with distance from the LMC centre…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
