Dust Distributions In The Magellanic Clouds

We present reddening maps of the Magellanic Clouds(MCs)based on the data from the optical and near-infrared(IR)photometric surveys.Interstellar dust consists of small solid particles.The particles are generally thought to be composed of a mixture of silicates and solid carbon.Dust can absorb and scatter starlight that pass through them,which cause extinction and reddening of the background objects in the optical and near-IR bands.The Large and Small Magellanic Cloud(LMC and SMC)are the largest satellite galaxies orbiting our Milky Way galaxy.Mapping the dust distribution in the MCs are fundamental for both the reddening corrections of sources in the MCs and the studies of the structure and properties of the dust in the two galaxies.We have collected multi-band photometric data from the optical and near-IR surveys that cover the MCs area,including the Gaia early Data Release 3(Gaia e DR3),the Sky Mapper Southern Survey DR2(SMSS DR2),the Survey of the Magellanic Stellar History DR2(SMASH DR2),the All-sky NOIRLab Source Catalog DR2(NSC DR2),the Two Micron All Sky Survey(2MASS)and the near-infrared YJK_SVISTA survey of the Magellanic Clouds system(VMC).We have obtained a multi-band photometric stellar sample of about 8.5 million stars in the LMC and SMC area.Based on the measurements of the proper motions and parallaxes of the individual stars from Gaia e DR3,we have built clean samples that contains stars from the LMC,SMC and Milky Way,which consist of 4.2,2 and 1.98 million stars,respectively.We applied the spectral energy distribution(SED)fitting to the samples to estimate the reddening values of the individual stars.As a result,we have derived the best-fitting reddening values of 3.1 million stars in the LMC,1.83 million stars in the SMC and 1.84 million stars in the Milky Way.They are those largest stellar samples in the MCs area that have reddening information measured.We then constructed high resolution dust reddening maps of the MCs.The resultant dust maps have the highest spatial resolution,with a typical resolution of only40 arcsec.Our results are consistent with those from the literature.Finally,we have excluded the foreground dust reddening of the Milky Way and obtained the local dust distribution in the LMC and SMC.