To separate stars and galaxies in the far infrared AKARI All-Sky Survey data,
we have selected a sample with the complete color information available in the
low extinction regions of the sky and constructed color-color plots for these
data. We looked for the method to separate stars and galaxies using the color
information. We performed an extensive search for the counterparts of these
selected All-Sky Survey sources in the NED and SIMBAD databases. Among 5176
objects, we found 4272 galaxies, 382 other extragalactic objects, 349 Milky Way
stars, 50 other Galactic objects, and 101 sources detected before in various
wavelengths but of an unknown origin. 22 sources were left unidentified. Then,
we checked colors of stars and galaxies in the far-infrared flux-color and
color-color plots. In the resulting diagrams, stars form two clearly separated
clouds. One of them is easy to be distinguished from galaxies and allows for a
simple method of excluding a large part of stars using the far-infrared data.
The other smaller branch, overplotting galaxies, consists of stars known to
have an infrared excess, like Vega and some fainter stars discovered by IRAS or
2MASS. The color properties of these objects in any case make them very
difficult to distinguish from galaxies. We conclude that the FIR color-color
diagrams allow for a high-quality star-galaxy separation. With the proposed
simple method we can select more that 95 % of galaxies rejecting at least 80 %
of stars.Comment: 20 pages, 41 figures, "Astronomy & Astrophysics", accepted, to appear
in the AKARI special issu
