• DOI:10.1093/mnras/stu1192
• Corpus ID: 118539380

A three-dimensional extinction map of the Galactic anticentre from multiband photometry

@article{Chen2014ATE,
  title={A three-dimensional extinction map of the Galactic anticentre from multiband photometry},
  author={B.-Q. Chen and X.-W. Liu and H.-B.Yuan and H.-H. Zhang and Mathias Schultheis and Biwei Jiang and Y. Huang and Maosheng Xiang and H.-B. Zhao and J.-S. Yao and H. J. Lu},
  journal={Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society},
  year={2014},
  volume={443},
  pages={1192-1210}
}

• B.-Q. Chen, X.-W. Liu, +8 authors H. Lu
• Published 16 June 2014
• Physics
• Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

We present a three-dimensional extinction map in the r band. The map has a spatial angular resolution, depending on latitude, between 3 and 9 arcmin and covers the entire Xuyi Schmidt Telescope Photometric Survey of the Galactic Anticentre (XSTPS-GAC) survey area of over 6000 deg(2) for Galactic longitude 140 < l < 240 deg and latitude -60 < b < 40 deg. By cross-matching the photometric catalogue of the XSTPS-GAC with those of 2MASS and WISE, we have built a multiband photometric stellar sample of about 30 million stars and applied spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting to the sample. By combining photometric data from the optical to the near-infrared, we are able to break the degeneracy between the intrinsic stellar colours and the amounts of extinction by dust grains for stars with high photometric accuracy, and trace the extinction as a function of distance for low Galactic latitude and thus highly extincted regions. This has allowed us to derive the best-fitting extinction and distance information of more than 13 million stars, which are used to construct the three-dimensional extinction map. We have also applied a Rayleigh-Jeans colour excess (RJCE) method to the data using the 2MASS and WISE colour (H - W2). The resulting RJCE extinction map is consistent with the integrated two-dimensional map deduced using the best-fitting SED algorithm. However for individual stars, the amounts of extinction yielded by the RJCE method suffer from larger errors than those given by the best-fitting SED algorithm.