The Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury VIII: A Wide-Area, High-Resolution Map of Dust Extinction in M31

TL;DR

This paper presents a high-resolution, direct dust extinction map of M31 using stellar photometry, revealing discrepancies with existing dust emission models and suggesting more emissive dust grains.

Contribution

Develops a novel CMD-based technique to map dust extinction at 25pc resolution in M31, improving spatial resolution and accuracy over previous emission-based maps.

Findings

Extinction map has >4 times better resolution than dust emission maps.

Draine & Li (2007) dust models overpredict extinction by ~2.5 times.

Discrepancy correlates with the interstellar radiation field spectrum.

Abstract

We map the distribution of dust in M31 at 25pc resolution, using stellar photometry from the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury. We develop a new mapping technique that models the NIR color-magnitude diagram (CMD) of red giant branch (RGB) stars. The model CMDs combine an unreddened foreground of RGB stars with a reddened background population viewed through a log-normal column density distribution of dust. Fits to the model constrain the median extinction, the width of the extinction distribution, and the fraction of reddened stars. The resulting extinction map has >4 times better resolution than maps of dust emission, while providing a more direct measurement of the dust column. There is superb morphological agreement between the new map and maps of the extinction inferred from dust emission by Draine et al. 2014. However, the widely-used Draine & Li (2007) dust models overpredict the observed extinction by a factor of ~2.5, suggesting that M31's true dust mass is lower and that dust grains are significantly more emissive than assumed in Draine et al. (2014). The discrepancy we identify is consistent with similar findings in the Milky Way by the Planck Collaboration (2015), but has a more complex dependence on parameters from the Draine & Li (2007) dust models. We also show that the discrepancy with the Draine et al. (2014) map is lowest where the interstellar radiation field has a harder spectrum than average. We discuss possible improvements to the CMD dust mapping technique, and explore further applications.