The Quest for the Missing Dust. I. Restoring Large-scale Emission in Herschel Maps of Local Group Galaxies

Because the galaxies of the Local Group have such large angular sizes, much of their diffuse, large-angular-scale emission is filtered out by the Herschel data reduction process. In this work, we restore this previously missed dust in Herschel observations of the Large Magellanic Cloud, Small Magellanic Cloud, M31, and M33. We do this by combining Herschel data (including new reductions for the Magellanic Clouds), in Fourier space, with lower-resolution data from all-sky surveys (Planck, IRAS, and COBE) that did not miss the extended emission. With these new maps, we find that a significant amount of emission was missing from uncorrected Herschel data of these galaxies: over 20% in some bands. Our new photometry also resolves the disagreement between fluxes reported from older HERITAGE Magellanic Cloud Herschel reductions and fluxes reported from other telescopes. More emission is restored in shorter-wavelength bands, especially in the galaxies' peripheries, making these regions 20%-40% bluer than before. We also find that the Herschel-PACS instrument response conflicts with the all-sky data, over the 20'-90' angular scales to which they are both sensitive, by up to 31%. By binning our new data based on hydrogen column density, we are able to detect emission from dust at low interstellar medium densities (at ΣH < 1 M⊙ pc-2 in some cases), and are able to detect emission at much lower densities (a factor of 2.2 lower on average, and more than a factor of 7 lower in several cases) than was possible with uncorrected dat