Spatial Variations of the Extinction Law in the Galactic Disk from
  Infrared Observations
  Infrared photometry in the J (1.2 microns), H (1.7 microns), Ks (2.2 microns)
bands from the 2MASS catalogue and in the W1 (3.4 microns), W2 (4.6 microns),
W3 (12 microns), W4 (22 microns) bands from the WISE catalogue is used to
reveal the spatial variations of the interstellar extinction law in the
infrared near the midplane of the Galaxy by the method of extrapolation of the
extinction law applied to clump giants. The variations of the coefficients
E(H-W1)/E(H-Ks), E(H-W2)/E(H-Ks), E(H-W3)/E(H-Ks), and E(H-W4)/E(H-Ks) along
the line of sight in 2 deg per 2 deg squares of the sky centered at b=0 and
l=20, 30, ..., 330, 340 deg as well as in several 4 deg per 4 deg squares with
|b|=10 are considered. The results obtained here agree with those obtained by
Zasowski et al. in 2009 using 2MASS and Spitzer-IRAC photometry for the same
longitudes and similar photometric bands, confirming their main result: in the
inner (relative to the Sun) Galactic disk, the fraction of fine dust increases
with Galactocentric distance (or the mean dust grain size decreases). However,
in the outer Galactic disk that was not considered by Zasowski et al., this
trend is reversed: at the disk edge, the fraction of coarse dust is larger than
that in the solar neighborhood. This general Galactic trend seems to be
explained by the influence of the spiral pattern: its processes sort the dust
by size and fragment it so that coarse and fine dust tend to accumulate,
respectively, at the outer and inner (relative to the Galactic center) edges of
the spiral arms. As a result, fine dust may exist only in the part of the
Galactic disk far from both the Galactic center and the edge, while coarse dust
dominates at the Galactic center, at the disk edge, and outside the disk.
