The GALEX Ultraviolet Virgo Cluster Survey (GUViCS). V. Ultraviolet diffuse emission and cirrus properties in the Virgo cluster direction

TL;DR

This study maps and analyzes the ultraviolet diffuse emission in the Virgo cluster direction using GALEX data, revealing its potential as a high-resolution Galactic dust tracer and its correlation with other dust indicators.

Contribution

It introduces the use of FUV diffuse light as a Galactic extinction tracer and provides high-resolution maps of diffuse UV emission in the Virgo region.

Findings

FUV diffuse light correlates with other Galactic dust tracers.

FUV emission helps refine Galactic dust extinction estimates.

Maps of diffuse UV emission are publicly available.

Abstract

CONTEXT: The Virgo direction has been observed at many wavelengths in the recent years, in particular in the ultraviolet with GALEX. The far ultraviolet (FUV) diffuse light detected by GALEX bears interesting information on the large scale distribution of Galactic dust, owing to the GALEX FUV band sensitivity and resolution. AIMS: We aim to characterise the ultraviolet large scale distribution of diffuse emission in the Virgo direction. A map of this emission may become useful for various studies by identifying regions where dust affects observations by either scattering light or absorbing radiation. METHODS: We construct mosaics of the FUV and near ultraviolet diffuse emission over a large sky region (RA 12 to 13 hours, DEC 0 to 20 degrees) surrounding the Virgo cluster, using all the GALEX available data in the area. We test for the first time the utilisation of the FUV diffuse light as a Galactic extinction E(B-V) tracer. RESULTS: The FUV diffuse light scattered on cirrus reveals details in their geometry. Despite a large dispersion, the FUV diffuse light correlates roughly with other Galactic dust tracers (coming from IRAS, Herschel, Planck), offering an opportunity to use the FUV emission to locate them in future studies with a better resolution (about 5 arcsec native resolution, 20 arcsec pixels maps presented in this paper) than several usual tracers. Estimating the Galactic dust extinction on the basis of this emission allows us to find a smaller dispersion in the NUV-i colour of background galaxies at a given E(B-V)than with other tracers. The diffuse light mosaics obtained in this work are made publicly available.