A Research of the Galactic Structure through the [CII] 158 Micron Line

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

By using a balloon borne telescope, an extensive survey of the [CII] line emission of the Galaxy has been undertaken. To minimize the instrumental emission, an off-axis telescope with a Newtonian-Nasmyth focus was used in conjunction with a liquid helium cooled Fabry-Perot spectrometer. The beam size of the telescope was 12' in diameter and the spectral resolution of the spectrometer was 175 km/s in velocity scale.The balloon flights were made from Palestine, TX in 1991 and from Alice Springs, Australia in 1992. By both obsevations, the major part of the galactic plane in the northern sky and the southern sky has been scanned. As a result, a complete map of the [CII] line intensity distribution has been constructed for the region from - 100ﾟ to 80ﾟ in galactic longitude and within (]SY.+-。[) 4ﾟ in galactic latitude. In addition to the general scan of the galactic plane, the observations were extended to some individual sources, such as Cyg-X region, p-Oph dark cloud and Large Magellanic Cloud.The observed maps reveal strong [CII] line emission extensively distributed in the galactic plane, as well as many discrete sources associated with HII regions and/or molecular clouds. The distribution is more or less correlated with far infrared continuum and CO line intensity distributions. However, detailed comparisons show interesting differences between the three components.