Hi-GAL, the Herschel infrared Galactic Plane Survey: Photometric maps and compact source catalogues: First data release for the inner Milky Way: +68° ≥ l ≥ -70°

By Sergio Molinari, E. Schisano, D. Elia, Michele Pestalozzi, A. Traficante, S. Pezzuto, B. Swinyard, A. Noriega-Crespo, J. Bally, T. Moore and 54 more. 2016

528 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Aims. We present the first public release of high-quality data products (DR1) from Hi-GAL, the Herschel infrared Galactic Plane Survey. Hi-GAL is the keystone of a suite of continuum Galactic plane surveys from the near-IR to the radio and covers five wavebands at 70, 160, 250, 350 and 500 μm, encompassing the peak of the spectral energy distribution of cold dust for 8 ≲ T ≲ 50 K. This first Hi-GAL data release covers the inner Milky Way in the longitude range 68° ≳ l ≳ −70° in a | b | ≤ 1° latitude strip. Methods. Photometric maps have been produced with the ROMAGAL pipeline, which optimally capitalizes on the excellent sensitivity and stability of the bolometer arrays of the Herschel PACS and SPIRE photometric cameras. It delivers images of exquisite quality and dynamical range, absolutely calibrated with Planck and IRAS, and recovers extended emission at all wavelengths and all spatial scales, from the point-spread function to the size of an entire 2°× 2° “tile” that is the unit observing block of the survey. The compact source catalogues were generated with the CuTEx algorithm, which was specifically developed to optimise source detection and extraction in the extreme conditions of intense and spatially varying background that are found in the Galactic plane in the thermal infrared. Results. Hi-GAL DR1 images are cirrus noise limited and reach the 1σ-rms predicted by the Herschel Time Estimators for parallel-mode observations at 60"^(s-1) scanning speed in relatively low cirrus emission regions. Hi-GAL DR1 images will be accessible through a dedicated web-based image cutout service. The DR1 Compact Source Catalogues are delivered as single-band photometric lists containing, in addition to source position, peak, and integrated flux and source sizes, a variety of parameters useful to assess the quality and reliability of the extracted sources. Caveats and hints to help in this assessment are provided. Flux completeness limits in all bands are determined from extensive synthetic source experiments and greatly depend on the specific line of sight along the Galactic plane because the background strongly varies as a function of Galactic longitude. Hi-GAL DR1 catalogues contain 123210, 308509, 280685, 160972, and 85460 compact sources in the five bands.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d1c64e765e278ff8f1f472b02d61aa0fbe7fe8e1

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Citations in the corpus

Characterizing precursors to stellar clusters with Herschel (2011, methodology): “Two 2◦ × 2◦ regions of the Hi-GAL survey were completed during the science demonstration phase (SDP; Molinari et al. 2010a), centered at approximately [ℓ, b] = [30◦, 0◦] and [59◦, 0◦].”
A 100 pc ELLIPTICAL AND TWISTED RING OF COLD AND DENSE MOLECULAR CLOUDS REVEALED BY HERSCHEL AROUND THE GALACTIC CENTER (2011, methodology): “Observing strategy and basic data reduction are described in Molinari et al. (2010a) ar X iv :1 10 5.”
Molecular gas kinematics within the central 250 pc of the Milky Way (2016, methodology): “The P2 and P3 locations correspond to local peaks in the molecular hydrogen column density maps derived from Hi-GAL (Herschel infrared Galactic plane survey; Molinari et al. 2010) data (Battersby et al. 2011, Battersby et al. in prep.).”
THE RED MSX SOURCE SURVEY: THE MASSIVE YOUNG STELLAR POPULATION OF OUR GALAXY (2013, methodology): “Future catalogs based on Herschel (eg HiGAL, Molinari et al. 2010) will alleviate both these limitations in the far-infrared and sub-mm regimes, but such surveys cannot truly determine source properties without additional shorter wavelength data.”
Hierarchical fragmentation and differential star formation in the Galactic ‘Snake’: infrared dark cloud G11.11−0.12 (2014, background): “The cold dust in IRDCs transitions to emission at longer wavelengths, from far-infrared to sub-millimeter and millimeter wavelengths (Molinari et al. 2010; Schuller et al. 2009; Rosolowsky et al. 2010; Aguirre et al. 2011).”
ATLASGAL — towards a complete sample of massive star forming clumps ⋆ (2014, methodology): “Our ability to make significant progress in this field has been dramatically enhanced in recent years with the completion of a large number of Galactic plane surveys that cover the whole wavelength range from the near-infrared to the radio [e.g. the UKIDSS GPS, Lucas et al. 2008; GLIMPSE, Benjamin e”
Ammonia from cold high-mass clumps discovered in the inner Galactic disk by the ATLASGAL survey (2012, background): “…plane surveys, conducted over a similar range, are the MSX survey covering 8 to 21 μm (Price et al. 2001), 2MASS around 2 μm (Skrutskie et al. 2006), GLIMPSE from 3 to 8 μm (Benjamin et al. 2003), MIPSGAL at 24 and 70 μm (Carey et al. 2009) and HiGAL from 70 to 500 μm (Molinari et al. 2010).”
EMU: Evolutionary Map of the Universe (2011, methodology): “The resolution of EMU is particularly well-matched to the MIPSGAL 24 mm (Carey et al. 2009) and Hi-GAL 70 mm (Molinari et al. 2010) survey images, of which the latter is an effective tracer of the intensity of the exciting radiation field (Compiègne et al. 2010).”
The ATLASGAL survey: a catalog of dust condensations in the Galactic plane (2013, methodology): “The ultimate goal of unbiased surveys is to identify (e.g. Motte et al. 2007; Schuller et al. 2009; Molinari et al. 2010b; Aguirre etal.”