ESA Science & Technology | Herschel | 2016 Apr 22
ESA's Herschel mission releases today a series of unprecedented maps of star-forming hubs in the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. This is accompanied by a set of catalogues listing hundreds of thousands of compact sources that span all phases leading to the birth of stars in our Galaxy. These maps and catalogues will be very valuable resources for astronomers, to exploit scientifically and for planning follow-up studies of particularly interesting regions in the Galactic Plane.
During its four years of operations (2009-2013), the Herschel space observatory scanned the sky at far-infrared and sub-millimetre wavelengths. Observations in this portion of the electromagnetic spectrum are sensitive to some of the coldest objects in the Universe, including cosmic dust, a minor but crucial component of the interstellar material from which stars are born.[c]Herschel's view of the Galactic Plane. Click to access the video.
Credit: ESA/Herschel/PACS, SPIRE/Hi-GAL Project[/c][hr][/hr]
The Herschel infrared Galactic Plane Survey (Hi-GAL) is the largest of all observing programmes carried out with Herschel, in terms of both observing time – over 900 hours of total observations, equivalent to almost 40 days – and sky coverage – about 800 square degrees, or two percent of the entire sky. Its aim was to map the entire disc of the Milky Way, where most of its stars form and reside, in five of Herschel's wavelength channels: 70, 160, 250, 350 and 500 μm.
Over the past two years, the Hi-GAL team has processed the data to obtain a series of calibrated maps of extraordinary quality and resolution. With a dynamical range of at least two orders of magnitude, these maps reveal the emission by diffuse material as well as huge filamentary structures and individual, point-like sources scattered across the images. ...
Today, the team releases the first part of this data set, consisting of 70 maps, each measuring two times two degrees, and provided in the five surveyed wavelengths. ...
Hi-GAL, the Herschel infrared Galactic Plane Survey:
photometric maps and compact source catalogues.
First data release for Inner Milky Way: +68°> l > -70° - S. Molinari et al
- Astronomy & Astrophysics (online 20 Apr 2016) DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201526380
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1604.05911 > 20 Apr 2016
