Spatial Variations of the Extinction Law in the Galactic Disk from Infrared Observations

TL;DR

This study investigates how the interstellar extinction law varies across the Galactic disk using infrared data, revealing a reversal of dust grain size distribution trends at the disk's outer edge.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of spatial variations in the infrared extinction law across the entire Galactic disk, including the outer regions.

Findings

Inner Galactic disk has increasing fine dust with distance from the Sun.

Outer disk shows a dominance of coarse dust at the edges.

Dust grain size distribution is influenced by spiral arm processes.

Abstract

Infrared photometry in the J (1.2 microns), H (1.7 microns), Ks (2.2 microns) bands from the 2MASS catalogue and in the W1 (3.4 microns), W2 (4.6 microns), W3 (12 microns), W4 (22 microns) bands from the WISE catalogue is used to reveal the spatial variations of the interstellar extinction law in the infrared near the midplane of the Galaxy by the method of extrapolation of the extinction law applied to clump giants. The variations of the coefficients E(H-W1)/E(H-Ks), E(H-W2)/E(H-Ks), E(H-W3)/E(H-Ks), and E(H-W4)/E(H-Ks) along the line of sight in 2 deg per 2 deg squares of the sky centered at b=0 and l=20, 30, ..., 330, 340 deg as well as in several 4 deg per 4 deg squares with |b|=10 are considered. The results obtained here agree with those obtained by Zasowski et al. in 2009 using 2MASS and Spitzer-IRAC photometry for the same longitudes and similar photometric bands, confirming their main result: in the inner (relative to the Sun) Galactic disk, the fraction of fine dust increases with Galactocentric distance (or the mean dust grain size decreases). However, in the outer Galactic disk that was not considered by Zasowski et al., this trend is reversed: at the disk edge, the fraction of coarse dust is larger than that in the solar neighborhood. This general Galactic trend seems to be explained by the influence of the spiral pattern: its processes sort the dust by size and fragment it so that coarse and fine dust tend to accumulate, respectively, at the outer and inner (relative to the Galactic center) edges of the spiral arms. As a result, fine dust may exist only in the part of the Galactic disk far from both the Galactic center and the edge, while coarse dust dominates at the Galactic center, at the disk edge, and outside the disk.