A 3D Map of Diffuse

Interstellar Band Strengths

Emmet Katzer and Chance Beaty

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What’s the Problem?
● Longest standing unsolved problem in astrophysics (1922):
○ What are the diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs)?
● Largest reservoir of organic material, but unidentified
○ Organic chemists: What gives?
● All carbon cycles through DIBs
● All of us were DIBs long ago

“We are made of star stuff.”

-Carl Sagan

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Interstellar Medium (ISM)
● Gas/dust in-between stars
● Wide range of physical conditions
● We’re interested in diffuse ISM
○ 3-50 K temperature
○ Mostly HI, number densities about 100
particles/cm3
○ About 1017 times less dense than the air we
breathe
○ About 100 times less dense than the best
vacuum we can create on Earth
○ Collisions occur once every decade or so
between hydrogen atoms

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What are Spectra?
● Spectra show intensities of light
as a function of wavelength
(color)

● Spectra can have

absorption lines (left),
emission lines (above), or
both
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Electron Energy Levels: Like Elevator Floors

● Electrons in atoms have discrete energies

● For electrons to move from one level to
another, they can absorb or release
energy only in certain amounts
○ They can only absorb certain
wavelengths of light, thus creating
absorption lines
● Hydrogen
alpha

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How Do We “See” DIBs?

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 How Do We “See” DIBs? cont...
● Absorption features
from the ISM
● To the right are two
very similar stars,
one with DIBs
(green) and one
without (red)

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How Do We “See” DIBs? cont...

● We measure DIB strength by their equivalent width

● Previous studies investigated coincidences between DIBs and known
compounds (failure)
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Our Approach: Spatial Distribution The Galactic Pizza:

0°

180°
Galactic Longitude

45°

-45°
Galactic Latitude 10
DIBs and Distance

● Single spectra can’t give

precise locations of the
interstellar clouds
● Spectra can only show how
much cloud material there is
● By looking at stars at
different distances we can
better tell where the clouds
are

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Sloan Digital Sky Survey

● Northern hemisphere imaging and

spectroscopic survey that began in
2000
● Imaging covers about 35% of the
celestial sphere
● Obtained low resolution spectra of
more than 3 million objects
○ We selected approximately 23,000
spectra on the basis of signal to noise
ratio and stellar parameters

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Selected Star Types
● Stars are classified into different types based on the features in their spectra
● On Beaches Astropirates Find Gold

Spectral Type Temperature (K) # of stars used

O stars >20,000 13

B stars 10,000-20,000 294

A stars 7,500-10,000 1833

F stars 6,000-7,500 8075
G stars 5,000-6,000 12864*

● Tradeoff between luminosity and spatial density

*We were more strict on signal to noise 13
Our Goal: Data Pipeline

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Process
Assign location and Find radial velocities of
Get spectral data from
distance to star from the star and correct
SDSS
GAIA database Doppler shift

Create template spectra Divide target star by Calculate equivalent

without presence of DIBs template width

Create heat maps that

will hopefully be
Apply to 23,000 stars Generate table of data
integrated into the
planetarium
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Doppler Shift Correction

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Templates

● A star template
○ Used for O, B and A stars
○ O and B stars aren’t too different from
A stars in our areas of interest

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F’n G Stars
● F3 template for F0-F5 stars
● F7 template for F6-F9 stars

● G1 template for G0-G3 stars

● G5 template for G4-G6 stars
● G8 template for G7-G9 stars 18
Template Division Example

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Check-for Function
● Measured signal to noise
ratio near DIB
● Calculated equivalent width
and its error
● Used a three sigma
standard to detect feature

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“Final Data”
Partial Table:

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Maps
● Maps need to be spherical

Our DIB maps represent a spherical

map, similar to a map of the Earth,
except we’re looking outwards
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Maps

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Maps

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Maps

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Maps

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Maps

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Maps

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Future
● Goal is put those heat maps onto a sphere and then integrate them into the
planetarium

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 Sources
● "Carl-Edward-Sagan.jpg." UpCosmos, 18 Jan. 2018, upcosmos.com/carl-edward-sagan/.
● Carroll, Bradley W. and Dale A. Ostlie. An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics. 2nd ed., Pearson Education Inc., 2007.
● "File:Gall–Peters projection SW.jpg." Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository. 29 Nov 2016. 2 Aug 2018, 18:05
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection_SW.jpg&oldid=223701322>.
● Gaia Collaboration et al. Description of the Gaia mission (spacecraft, instruments, survey and measurement principles, and
operations), 2016. 10 July 2018.
● Gaia Collaboration et al. Summary of the contents and survey properties, 2018. 10 July 2018.
● Jaschek, Carlos and Mercedes Jaschek. The Classification of Stars. Cambridge University Press, 1987.
● Karttunen, Hannu, et al. Fundamental Astronomy. 5th ed., Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2007.
● Lan, Ting-Wen, et al. “Exploring the Diffuse Interstellar Bands with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.” Monthly Notices of the Royal
Astronomical Society, vol. 452, no. 4, 2015, pp. 3629–3649., doi:10.1093/mnras/stv1519.
● SDSS. Sloan Digital Sky Survey, 2018, www.sdss.org. 6 June 2018.
● The STScI Digitized Sky Survey. Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Inc., 1994, http://archive.stsci.edu/cgi-
bin/dss_form/. 3 August 2018.
● This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia),
processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC,
https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in
particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement.

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 Special Thanks to:

Dr. Dahlstrom

National Science Foundation under Grant DUE-1660620

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Questions?

Our info?

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Questions?

Our info?
Emmet Katzer - ekatzer@carthage.edu
Chance Beaty - cbeaty@carthage.edu

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No Flux Given
What an actual G star looks like: What some of the SDSS G stars look like:

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