Gaia DR3 and nearby galaxies: where do foregrounds matter?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Nearby galaxies provide populations of stellar and non-stellar sources at a common distance and in quantifiable environments. All are observed through the Milky Way foreground, with varying degrees of contamination that depend on observed Galactic latitude and the distance and size of the target galaxy. This work uses Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3) to identify foreground sources via astrometric measurements and thus quantify foreground contamination for a large sample of nearby galaxies. There are approximately half a million Gaia sources in the directions of 1401 galaxies listed in the Local Volume Galaxy catalogue (D < 11 Mpc), excluding the largest Local Group galaxies. About two-thirds of the Gaia sources have astrometric properties consistent with foreground sources; these sources are brighter, redder, and less centrally concentrated than non-foreground sources. Averaged over galaxies, foreground sources make up 50 per cent of Gaia sources at projected radius r50 = 1.06a26, where a26 is the angular diameter at the B = 26.5 isophote. Foreground sources make up 50 per cent of Gaia sources at apparent magnitude mG, 50 = 20.50. This limit corresponds to the tip of the red giant branch absolute magnitude at D = 450 kpc, and to the globular cluster luminosity function peak absolute magnitude at 5 Mpc. Gaia data provide a powerful tool for removing foreground contamination in stellar population studies of nearby galaxies, although Gaia foreground removal will be incomplete beyond distances of 5 Mpc.