Galactic Latitude Dependence of Near-Infrared Diffuse Galactic Light : Thermal Emission or Scattered Light?

TL;DR

This study investigates whether thermal emission or scattered light explains the Galactic latitude dependence of near-infrared diffuse Galactic light, concluding that scattered light primarily accounts for the observed variation.

Contribution

The paper presents a combined model showing that scattered light, rather than thermal emission, explains the Galactic latitude dependence of near-IR DGL, incorporating recent Planck observations.

Findings

Thermal emission contributes less than ~20% to near-IR DGL.

A plane-parallel scattering model reproduces observed b-dependence.

Uncertainty in dust emission correction affects analysis robustness.

Abstract

Near-infrared (IR) diffuse Galactic light (DGL) consists of scattered light and thermal emission from interstellar dust grains illuminated by interstellar radiation field (ISRF). At 1.25 and 2.2um, recent observational study shows that intensity ratios of the DGL to interstellar 100um dust emission steeply decrease toward high Galactic latitudes (b). In this paper, we investigate origin(s) of the b-dependence on the basis of models of thermal emission and scattered light. Combining a thermal emission model with regional variation of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon abundance observed with Planck, we show that contribution of the near-IR thermal emission component to the observed DGL is less than ~20%. We also examine the b-dependence of the scattered light, assuming a plane-parallel Galaxy with smooth distributions of the ISRF and dust density along vertical direction, and assuming a scattering phase function according to a recently developed model of interstellar dust. We normalize the scattered light intensity to the 100um intensity corrected for deviation from the cosecant-b law according to the Planck observation. As the result, the present model taking all the b-dependence of dust and ISRF properties can account for the observed b-dependence of the near-IR DGL. However, uncertainty of the correction for the 100um emission is large and other normalizing quantities may be appropriate for more robust analysis of the DGL.