Göttingen 2025 – scientific programme
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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik
T 78: Gamma Astronomy II
T 78.8: Talk
Thursday, April 3, 2025, 18:00–18:15, VG 2.103
Spatially coherent 3D distributions of HI and CO in the Milky Way — •Laurin Söding1, Gordian Edenhofer2,3, Torsten A. Enßlin2,3,6, Philipp Frank2, Ralf Kissmann4, Vo Hong Minh Phan5, Andrés Ramírez4, Hanieh Zandinejad2,3, and Philipp Mertsch1 — 1RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany — 2Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Garching, Germany — 3Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany — 4Universität Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria — 5Sorbonne Université, Paris, France — 6Excellence cluster ORIGINS, Garching, Germany
The spatial distribution of the gaseous components of the Milky Way is of great importance for a number of different fields, for example, Galactic structure, star formation, cosmic rays, and diffuse emission. We used three-dimensional (3D) Gaussian processes to model correlations in the interstellar medium, including correlations between different lines of sight, and enforce a spatially coherent structure in the prior. We inferred the spatial distributions of atomic hydrogen (HI), carbon monoxide (CO), their emission line widths, and the Galactic velocity field in a joint Bayesian inference from multiple datasets, mainly Doppler-shifted line emission. Our main result consists of a set of samples that implicitly contain statistical uncertainties. We confirm previous findings regarding the warping and flaring of the Galactic disc. A comparison with 3D dust maps reveals a good agreement on scales larger than approximately 400 pc. While our results are not free of artefacts, they present a big step forward in obtaining high-quality 3D maps of the interstellar medium.
Keywords: Bayesian inference; Interstellar medium; Galaxy structure; Milky Way