Global Extinction in Spiral Galaxies

Magnitude-limited samples of spiral galaxies drawn from the Ursa Major and Pisces Clusters are used to determine their extinction properties as a function of inclination. Imaging photometry is available for 87 spirals in the B, R, I, and K-prime bands. Extinction causes systematic scatter in color-magnitude plots. A strong luminosity dependence is found. Relative edge-on to face-on extinction of up to 1.7 mag is found at B for the most luminous galaxies but is unmeasurably small for faint galaxies. At R the differential absorption with inclination reaches 1.3 mag, at I it reaches 1.0 mag, and at K-prime the differential absorption can in the extreme be as great as 0.3 mag. The luminosity dependence of reddening can be translated into a dependence on rotation rate, which is a distance-independent observable. Hence, corrections can be made that are useful for distance measurements. The strong dependence of the corrections on luminosity act to steepen luminosity-line width correlations. The effect is greatest toward the blue, with the consequence that luminosity-line width slope dependences are now only weakly a function of color. (Author)