Two powerful telescopes provide the most detailed radio maps of the Northern Galactic Plane
By combining two of the most powerful radio telescopes on Earth, an international team of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, created the most sensitive maps of the radio emission of large parts of the Northern Galactic plane so far. The data were taken with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico in two different configurations and the 100-m Effelsberg telescope near Bonn. This provides for the first time a radio survey covering all angular scales down to 1.5 arc-seconds, the apparent size of a tennis ball lying on the ground and seen from a flying plane. Contrary to previous surveys, GLOSTAR observed not only the radio continuum in the frequency range from 4-8 GHz in full polarization, but simultaneously also spectral lines that trace the molecular gas (from methanol and formaldehyde) and atomic gas via radio recombination lines.
Click here to see a movie of image.
The Global View on Star formation in the Milky Way (GLOSTAR) project provides the most sensitive maps of the radio emission of large parts of the Northern Galactic plane so far, taken with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico in two different configurations and MPIfR’s 100-m Effelsberg radio telescope. The exciting set of new data is now being used to study the interstellar medium in the Milky Way as well as massive stars in their infancy and their death. Shortly after the 50th birthday of the Effelsberg radio telescope, a series of papers based on the GLOSTAR data have now been published by Astronomy & Astrophysics.
This is part of a parallel press release by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR, Bonn) and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO, USA) that coincide with the first results that have been published in a series of four related papers in “Astronomy & Astrophysics”.
For more details see follow the links to the press releases below:
Drs James Urquhart and Sam Billington are members of the GLOSTAR team and have contributed to the four published papers.