The Formation of Dust Lanes in Nearby, Edge-on Disk Galaxies

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Scientific paper

We propose a comprehensive study of dust emission and absorption in a large sample of nearby, edge-on disk galaxies. We have recently discovered a sudden change in dust lane properties using ground-based and HST observations; all galaxies with rotation speeds in access of 120km/s show dust lanes, but none are seen in the slower rotators. Because dust and molecular gas are tightly coupled, this suggest a sudden transition in the state of the multi-phase ISM. We could be seeing a change in the amount of dust in galaxies, or galaxies could become dynamically unstable at 120km/s, forming spiral arms and compressing the ISM in thin lanes. Dust extinction studies are sensitive only to dust in front of the stars, and Spitzer observations are essential to fully quantify vertical dust distributions in edge-on galaxies. Here we propose to obtain four channel IRAC imaging of 15 nearby, well resolved edge-on galaxies and three channel MIPS scan images of 5 edge-on galaxies with large enough scale heights to be resolved at 70 micron. With these observations we can: - determine the cold dusty ISM distribution from the PAH emission in the 8 micron IRAC images; - measure hot and cold dust scale sizes from the MIPS observations, and; - establish the stellar light distribution from the IRAC 3.6 and 4.5 micron images, which in conjunction with our existing HST imaging will allow us to accurately quantify extinction structure on arcsec scales. Our targets cover a range in rotation velocity and other galaxy properties, and in combination with our radiative transfer models, we will fully quantify the change in dusty ISM properties across the 120km/s transition.

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