The Wisconsin Hα Mapper: A New Look at the Warm Ionized Medium

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

The Wisconsin Hα Mapper (WHAM) has surveyed the entire northern sky in Hα from Kitt Peak, Arizona. Using a high-throughput, 15-cm diameter double-etalon Fabry-Perot spectrometer and a sensitive CCD detector, the WHAM survey provides the first calibrated, velocity-resolved map of Hα emission in our Galaxy. A large portion of the Galaxy, which samples regions of the Local (Orion) spiral arm and the more distant Perseus arm, has been also been observed with the WHAM in lines of [S II] and [N II]. These new data directly probe the physical conditions of the Warm Ionized Medium (WIM) on a global scale for the first time. Trends in these line ratios over this large region of the sky suggest that temperature variations are traced by the [N II]/Hα and [S II]/Hα maps. Since these ratios increase dramatically away from the Galactic plane, they reveal a substantial temperature rise in WIM halo gas. In addition to this striking new result, the data set also reveals new information about the ionization in the WIM through the [S II]/[N II] ratio, uncovers a previously undiscovered B-star H II region, and provides an accurate measurement of the electron scale height of the WIM.

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