A new optical extinction law and distance estimate for the Taurus-Auriga molecular cloud

Abstract

This paper presents optical spectrophotometry of field stars projected on the Taurus-Auriga molecular cloud. We derive extinction laws for heavily reddened stars in this sample and show that the reddening law through the dark cloud is nearly identical to the standard law for lambda-lambda(3600-6100) and A<SUB>V</SUB> approximately less than 3 mag. Our spectroscopic parallaxes suggest a distance of 140 +/- 10 pc for the northern portion of the cloud and show no compelling evidence for a substantial variation in distance across the leading edge of the cloud.