ESO: ATLASGAL Survey of Milky Way Completed

[bystander]

ATLASGAL Survey of Milky Way Completed
ESO Photo Release | APEX | ATLASGAL | 2016 Feb 24

[img3="The southern plane of the Milky Way from the ATLASGAL survey
Credit: ESO/APEX/ATLASGAL consortium/NASA/GLIMPSE consortium/ESA/Planck"]http://cdn.eso.org/images/screen/eso1606c.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]

A spectacular new image of the Milky Way has been released to mark the completion of the APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL). The APEX telescope in Chile has mapped the full area of the Galactic Plane visible from the southern hemisphere for the first time at submillimetre wavelengths — between infrared light and radio waves — and in finer detail than recent space-based surveys. The pioneering 12-metre APEX telescope allows astronomers to study the cold Universe: gas and dust only a few tens of degrees above absolute zero.

APEX, the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment telescope, is located at 5100 metres above sea level on the Chajnantor Plateau in Chile’s Atacama region. The ATLASGAL survey took advantage of the unique characteristics of the telescope to provide a detailed view of the distribution of cold dense gas along the plane of the Milky Way galaxy [1]. The new image includes most of the regions of star formation in the southern Milky Way [2].

The new ATLASGAL maps cover an area of sky 140 degrees long and 3 degrees wide, more than four times larger than the first ATLASGAL release [3]. The new maps are also of higher quality, as some areas were re-observed to obtain a more uniform data quality over the whole survey area.

The ATLASGAL survey is the single most successful APEX large programme with nearly 70 associated science papers already published, and its legacy will expand much further with all the reduced data products now available to the full astronomical community [4]. ...

Mapping Cold Dust in the Universe
Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) | 2016 Feb 24

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[b][color=#0000FF]Credit: ESO/ATLASGAL consortium/NASA/GLIMPSE consortium/ VVV Survey/ESA/Planck/D. Minniti/S. Guisard Acknowledgement: Ignacio Toledo, Martin Kornmesser[/color][/b]

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This comparison shows the central regions of the Milky Way observed at different wavelengths.

The top panel shows compact sources of submillimetre radiation detected by APEX as part of the ATLASGAL survey, combined with complementary data from ESA’s Planck satellite, to capture more extended features.

The second panel shows the same region as seen in shorter, infrared, wavelengths by the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope.

The third panel shows the same part of sky again at even shorter wavelengths, the near-infrared, as seen by ESO’s VISTA infrared survey telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. Regions appearing as dark dust tendrils here show up brightly in the ATLASGAL view.

Finally the bottom picture shows the more familiar view in visible light, where most of the more distant structures are hidden from view.>>