Bibcode
Mediavilla, E.; Munhoz, J. A.; Falco, E.; Arribas, S.; Motta, V.
Bibliographical reference
1er Congreso Nacional de Astrofísica Molecular: Una visión general del potencial de los grupos de química españoles anters los nuevos desafíos de la Astrofísica. Heled in Cuidad Real, España, 1-4 Diciembre, 2003., p.68
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2003
Citations
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Refereed citations
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Description
Dust is present everywhere in the Universe. Dust absorbs and scatters
light dimming the astrophysical sources. Precise measurements of the
attenuation dependence with wavelength (extinction curve) have been
based in the comparison of spectra from pairs of identical stars
suffering different amount of extinction. The study of dust extinction
is crucial in Astrophysics and Cosmology for this effect hides stars and
galaxies, mistakes their distance and masks their nature. On the other
hand, the study of extinction curves in other galaxies is also essential
to inform our knowledge about dust Astrophysics. However spectra of
individual stars can only be obtained for galaxies in the Local Group
and precise measurements of the extinction curve have been available
only for this tiny region of the Universe. Here we present an optical
and UV extinction curve corresponding to a z=0.83 lens galaxy. It has
been obtained by comparing the spectra of two intrinsically identical
images of the same lensed quasar which follow different paths through
the lens galaxy suffering a different amount of extinction. The
extinction curve presents the bump at 2175 Å (usually associated
to carbonaceous small grains or large PAH molecules) of moderate
strength typical of some low density sight lines in the Milky Way. This
extension of the standard pair method to the extra-galactic realm open
the study of dust properties out to z=1.