Spatial distribution of interstellar gas in the innermost 3 kpc of our galaxy

By K. Ferrière, William GillardPierre Jean. 2007

213 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We review the present observational knowledge on the spatial distribution and the physical state of the different (molecular, atomic and ionized) components of the interstellar gas in the innermost 3 kpc of our Galaxy - a region which we refer to as the interstellar Galactic bulge, to distinguish it from its stellar counterpart. We try to interpret the observations in the framework of recent dynamical models of interstellar gas flows in the gravitational potential of a barred galaxy. Finally, relying on both the relevant observations and their theoretical interpretation, we propose a model for the space-averaged density of each component of the interstellar gas in the interstellar Galactic bulge.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/96a6662d4de140431caf037eca14cc80e9a764c4

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Variations in the Galactic star formation rate and density thresholds for star formation (2012, methodology): “The totalderived mass of the CMZ gas from the HiGAL data is 4.1× 07 M⊙, in good agreement with previous measurements in the literature (Ferrière et al. 2007).”
The Fermi Galactic Center GeV Excess and Implications for Dark Matter (2017, methodology): “As a tracer of the CR production in the CMZ we use the distribution of molecular gas, which we model by a simplified axisymmetric version of Equation(18) in Ferrière et al. (2007).”
DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODEL OF GALACTIC INTERSTELLAR EMISSION FOR STANDARD POINT-SOURCE ANALYSIS OF FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE DATA (2016, background): “The central molecular zone (CMZ) is a massive complex of giant molecular clouds located in the central region of the Galaxy (Serabyn & Morris 1996; Ferrière et al. 2007).”
Galactic secondary positron flux at the Earth (2008, background): “…hydrogen and helium densities are of course approximations based on local estimates, but we do not expect significant changes in the averaging within the kpc scale (Ferrière et al. 2007), which, as we show in the subsequent sections, is the relevant scale for the secondary positron propagation.”
Molecular gas kinematics within the central 250 pc of the Milky Way (2016, background): “◦29 as in Sawada et al. 2004 and Ferrière et al. 2007), with apocentre radius, rmaj = 120 pc (Sofue 1995), pericentre radius, rmin = 80 pc (an eccentric orbit is required to produce non-zero line-of-sight velocities at l = 0.”
The 511 keV emission from positron annihilation in the Galaxy (2010, methodology): “The gas properties in the Galactic bulge are less well established, but on the whole, all gas components appear to be hotter and denser in the bulge than in the disk (Ferrière et al., 2007).”
Gas flow models in the Milky Way embedded bars (2008, background): “The spatial distribution of the interstellar gas in the innermost 3 kpc of the Galaxy has recently been reviewed by Ferrière et al. (2007).”
Cosmic-ray propagation with DRAGON2: I. numerical solver and astrophysical ingredients (2016, methodology): “For the inner Galaxy (r < 3 kpc) we use here an azimuthally averaged version of the inner Galaxy HI three-dimensional distribution given in [80].”