Correlations between Dust Extinction Features across All Wavelength Scales: From Diffuse Interstellar Bands to R(V)

TL;DR

This study reveals correlations between dust extinction features across all wavelength scales, linking diffuse interstellar bands, broad structures, and the overall extinction slope, using large spectroscopic surveys to understand dust properties and chemistry.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to connect features across different wavelength scales by combining high-resolution DIB data with low-resolution extinction measurements, revealing new correlations and chemical variations.

Findings

Most DIBs increase with R(V) and ISS strength.

One DIB decreases with R(V), indicating chemical variation.

First evidence of chemical changes associated with R(V).

Abstract

Understanding variations in the dust extinction curve is imperative for using dust as a tracer of local structure in the interstellar medium, understanding dust chemistry, and observational color corrections where dust is a nuisance parameter. However, the extinction curve is complicated and exhibits features across a wide range of wavelength scales, from narrow atomic lines and diffuse interstellar bands ("DIBs"), to intermediate-scale and very broad structures ("ISS" and "VBS"), and the overall slope of the optical extinction curve, parameterized by R(V). Robust, population-level studies of variations in these features are only now possible with large, all-sky, spectroscopic surveys. However, these features are often studied independently because they require drastically different spectral resolution. In this work, we couple features with disparate wavelength scales by cross-matching precision catalogs of DIB measurements from APOGEE and Gaia RVS with low-resolution extinction-curve measurements from Gaia XP. Using this combination, we show that there are meaningful correlations between the strengths of extinction-curve features across all wavelength scales. We present a model that statistically explains part of the excess scatter in DIB strength versus extinction, and we show variation in line shapes of two DIBs as a function of R(V). We find that most DIBs increase in strength with increasing R(V) and/or increasing strength of the ISS, though we found one DIB that anomalously decreases in strength with increasing R(V). Using the behavior of the ensemble of DIBs in APOGEE, we present this as the first evidence of systematic chemical variation accompanying R(V) variation.