Galactic CO maps

DOI

Carbon monoxide (CO) is the best tracer of Galactic molecular hydrogen H_2_. Its lowest rotational emission lines are in the radio regime, and thanks to Galactic rotation, emission at different distances is Doppler shifted. For a given gas flow model, the observed spectra can thus be deprojected along the line of sight to infer the gas distribution. We used the CO-line survey of Dame et al. (2001ApJ...547..792D) to reconstruct the three-dimensional density of H_2_. We considered the deprojection as a Bayesian variational inference problem. The posterior distribution of the gas densities allowed us to estimate the mean and uncertainty of the reconstructed density. Unlike most of the previous attempts, we took the correlations of gas on a variety of scales into account, which allowed us to correct for some of the well-known pathologies, such as finger-of-god effects. The two gas flow models that we adopted incorporate a Galactic bar that induces radial motions in the inner few kiloparsecs and thus offers spectral resolution towards the Galactic centre. We compared our gas maps with those of earlier studies and characterise their statistical properties, for instance the radial profile of the average surface mass density. We have made our three-dimensional gas maps and their uncertainties available to the community here and at https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5501196.

Identifier
DOI http://doi.org/10.26093/cds/vizier.36550064
Source https://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/lp/custom/CDS.VizieR/J/A+A/655/A64
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/A+A/655/A64
Related Identifier http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/A+A/655/A64
Metadata Access http://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/pmh/pubreg.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_b2find&identifier=ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/A+A/655/A64
Provenance
Creator Mertsch P.; Vittino A.
Publisher CDS
Publication Year 2021
Rights https://cds.unistra.fr/vizier-org/licences_vizier.html
OpenAccess true
Contact CDS support team <cds-question(at)unistra.fr>
Representation
Resource Type Dataset; AstroObjects
Discipline Astrophysics and Astronomy; Galactic and extragalactic Astronomy; Interstellar medium; Natural Sciences; Observational Astronomy; Physics