Other
Scientific paper
Sep 1986
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1986baas...18.1024d&link_type=abstract
Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 18, 1024 (1986)
Other
Co, Molecular Clouds, Milky Way
Scientific paper
Two nearly identical 1.2 m telescopes, one in New York City, the other at Cerro Tololo, Chile, were used to produce a panorama of the entire Milky Way in the J=1-0 line of CO at 115 GHz. Sixteen separate CO surveys, most of them fully sampled at an angular resolution of 1/2 deg, were combined to cover a strip at least 10 deg wide in latitude encompassing the entire Galactic plane, with extensions that include the high-latitude clouds of Gould's Belt. The composite survey, containing more than 31,000 spectra, fully samples ~7700 deg2, nearly a fifth of the entire sky. The low-velocity emission is well correlated with the projected distribution of dark clouds: large CO clouds in Lupus, Ophiuchus, and Aquila mark the high-latitude extension of Gould's Belt, while opposite in the sky the Taurus and Orion clouds mark its low-latitude extension. The much higher density of dark clouds in the northern Milky Way versus the southern, obvious on large-scale photographs, is also evident in the CO maps. The molecular mass within 1 kpc of the Sun is about four times greater in the first and second quadrants than in the third and fourth. The composite longitude and wide latitude coverage of the composite survey permits, for the first time, a fairly complete determination of the distribution of molecular clouds near the Sun. The measured rms dispersion about the Galactic plane of molecular gas within 1 kpc, 74 pc, corresponds to a Gaussian with half-thickness at half-intensity of 87 pc. The mean surface density of molecular gas within 1 kpc is 1.3 Mo pc-2; assuming a Gaussian z distribution with a half-thickness of 87 pc, the mean midplane density at the solar circle is ~0.0068 Mo pc-3, or 0.10 H2 cm-3.
Dame Thomas M.
Thaddeus Patrick
Ungerechts Hans
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