Effect of particulates on the visibility of stars?
Aerosol physics is actually an old topic - yet still a very vibrant one.
One main factor on the extinction (which sums up scattering and absorption) other than the distance (which is about constant when looking at a a particular zenith distance) is the wavelength $\lambda$ you look at compared to the typical aerosol particle radius $r$ as its ratio affects the scattering regime we look at ($\lambda \gg r, \lambda \approx r, \lambda \ll r$). There's multiple papers on the aerosol influence on observations, like this (Stubbs et al) for PanSTARRS or Patat et al (2018) on extinction over Paranal which also looks at the temporal variability.
Looking at the typical aerosol concentrations (e.g. here by DWD), it seems that the smaller particles are more abundant. Thus we are in the Rayleigh or Mie scattering regimes where the extinction is due to scattering and does not depend much on the actual particle properties other than their size. The actual absorption only becomes important for the larger particles which are the least abundant.
All in all this might only be half an answer, but too long for a comment and maybe gives you leads to follow-up on. If you get a hand on Friedlander's &quot;smoke, dust and haze&quot;, it might be a good read, too (especially chapters 5 and 13).