A&A 633, A51 (2020) Astronomy https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201936145 & c ESO 2020 Astrophysics A compendium of distances to molecular clouds in the Star Formation Handbook?,?? Catherine Zucker1, Joshua S. Speagle1, Edward F. Schlafly2, Gregory M. Green3, Douglas P. Finkbeiner1, Alyssa Goodman1,5, and João Alves4,5 1 Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, 60 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA e-mail:
[email protected],
[email protected] 2 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, One Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA 3 Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Physics and Astrophysics Building, 452 Lomita Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, USA 4 University of Vienna, Department of Astrophysics, Türkenschanzstraße 17, 1180 Vienna, Austria 5 Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, 10 Garden St, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA Received 21 June 2019 / Accepted 12 August 2019 ABSTRACT Accurate distances to local molecular clouds are critical for understanding the star and planet formation process, yet distance mea- surements are often obtained inhomogeneously on a cloud-by-cloud basis. We have recently developed a method that combines stellar photometric data with Gaia DR2 parallax measurements in a Bayesian framework to infer the distances of nearby dust clouds to a typical accuracy of ∼5%. After refining the technique to target lower latitudes and incorporating deep optical data from DECam in the southern Galactic plane, we have derived a catalog of distances to molecular clouds in Reipurth (2008, Star Formation Handbook, Vols. I and II) which contains a large fraction of the molecular material in the solar neighborhood. Comparison with distances derived from maser parallax measurements towards the same clouds shows our method produces consistent distances with .10% scatter for clouds across our entire distance spectrum (150 pc−2.5 kpc).