Pleiades Reddening Scholarship: An Assessment for Graduate Students

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Since 1953, the most marked influences on Pleiades reddening scholarship have been events in 1976 and 1986-87. Before 1976, majority judgment favored nonuniform Pleiades reddening. After Crawford & Perry (1976, AJ, 81, 419) endorsed that view, however, a spurious uniform value [E(B-V) = 0.04] became prevalent. That datum was based on (1) a negligent reading of the Crawford-Perry abstract and (2) neglect and misrepresentation of the main text of Crawford & Perry and of other papers that favored nonuniform reddening. This problem was exacerbated when Breger (1986, ApJ, 309, 311) and Stauffer & Hartmann (1987, ApJ, 318, 337) published Pleiades reddening studies. If statistical analysis is applied to their data, one finds (1) nonuniform reddening in the northwestern part of the cluster, and (2) a difference between the mean reddening values in the northwestern and eastern cluster regions (for an extensive followup analysis, see Taylor 2008, AJ, 136, 1388). However, because statistical analysis has been excluded from the Pleiades reddening problem (and others), the principal response to the papers of Breger and Stauffer & Hartmann was an updated and widespread--but also mistaken and fallacious--conclusion that E(B-V) = 0.04 everywhere in the Pleiades outside the so-called "Southwest Nebula." Subsequent evidence for nonuniform Pleiades reddening (see Stello & Nissen 2001, A&A, 374, 105) was likewise not treated statistically and had no apparent effect on prevailing judgment in any event. It is concluded that (1) the photometric discipline has paid a noteworthy price for its exclusion of statistical analysis from cluster reddening studies, and (2) Pleiades reddening studies have been distorted as badly as those of M67 and NGC 752. (For histories of reddening studies of those clusters, see Taylor 2007a, AJ 133, 370, and Taylor 2007b, AJ, 134, 934, respectively.)

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