Moreover, there could also be some contribution to the detected temperature asymmetry from high-latitude gas clouds in our Galaxy along the line of sight toward M 81. In this respect we note that M 81 is at about 40.9° north of the Galactic disk, where contamination from the Milky Way is expected to be low. However, interpretation of astronomical observations is often hampered by the lack of direct distance information. Indeed, it is often not easy to judge whether objects on the same line of sight are physically related or not. Since the discovery of the Arp’s Loop (Arp 1965) the nature of the interstellar clouds in this region has been debated; in particular whether they are related to the tidal arms around the galaxy triplet (Sun et al. 2005; de Mello et al. 2008) or to Galactic foreground cirrus (Sollima et al. 2010; Davies et al. 2010). Already Sandage et al. (1976) presented evidence showing that we are observing the M 81 triplet through widespread Galactic foreground cirrus clouds and de Vries et al. 1987 built large-scale HI, CO, and dust maps that showed Galactic cirrus emission toward the M 81 region with NH ≃ 1−2  ×  1020 cm-2. The technique used to distinguish between the emission from extragalactic or Galactic gas and dust relies on spectral measurements and on the identification of the line of sight velocities, which are expected to be different in each case. Unfortunately, in the case of the M 81 Group, this technique appears hardly applicable since the radial velocities of extragalactic and Galactic clouds share a similar LSR (local standard of rest) velocity range (Heithausen 2012). Several small-area molecular clouds (SAMS), that is, tiny molecular clouds in a region where the shielding of the interstellar radiation field is too low (so that these clouds cannot survive for a long time), have been detected by Heithausen (2002) toward the M 81 Group. More recently, data from the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (SPIRE) instrument onboard Herschel ESA space observatory and Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS) onboard Spitzer allowed the identification of several dust clouds north of the M 81 galaxy with a total hydrogen column density in the range 1.5–5 × 1020 cm-2 and dust temperatures between 13 and 17 K (Heithausen 2012). However, since there is no obvious difference among the individual clouds, there was no way to distinguish between Galactic or extragalactic origin although it is likely that some of the IR emission both toward M 81 and NGC 3077 is of Galactic origin. Temperature asymmetry studies in Planck data may be indicative of the bulk dynamics in the observed region provided that other Local (Galactic) contamination in the data is identified and subtracted. This is not always possible, as in the case of the M 81 Group, and therefore it would be important to identify and study other examples of dust clouds where their origin, either Galactic or extragalactic, is not clear. One such example might be provided by the interacting system toward NGC 4435/4438 (Cortese et al. 2010) where the SAMS found appear more consistent with Galactic cirrus clouds than with extragalactic molecular complexes. Incidentally, the region A1 within R0.50 has been studied by Barker et al. (2009), who found evidence for the presence of an extended structural component beyond the M 81 optical disk, with a much flatter surface brightness profile, which might contain ≃10–15% of the M 81 total V-band luminosity. However, the lack of both a similar analysis in the other quadrants (and at larger distances from the M 81 center) and the study of the gas and dust component associated to this evolved stellar population, hamper our understanding of whether this component may explain the observed temperature asymmetry toward the M 81 halo.
Citation: de Vries et al. 1987
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