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Recovering interstellar gas properties with HI spectral lines: a comparison between synthetic spectra and 21-SPONGE
Citation
Murray, CE and Stanimirovic, S and Kim, C-G and Ostriker, EC and Lindner, RR and Heiles, C and Dickey, JM and Babler, B, Recovering interstellar gas properties with HI spectral lines: a comparison between synthetic spectra and 21-SPONGE, Astrophysical Journal, 837, (1) Article 55. ISSN 0004-637X (2017) [Refereed Article]
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Copyright Statement
Copyright 2017 The American Astronomical Society
DOI: doi:10.3847/1538-4357/aa5d12
Abstract
We analyze synthetic neutral hydrogen (HI) absorption and emission spectral lines from a high-resolution, three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulation to quantify how well observational methods recover the physical properties of interstellar gas. We present a new method for uniformly decomposing HI spectral lines and estimating the properties of associated gas using the Autonomous Gaussian Decomposition (AGD) algorithm. We find that HI spectral lines recover physical structures in the simulation with excellent completeness at high Galactic latitude, and this completeness declines with decreasing latitude due to strong velocity-blending of spectral lines. The temperature and column density inferred from our decomposition and radiative transfer method agree with the simulated values within a factor of <2 for the majority of gas structures. We next compare synthetic spectra with observations from the 21-SPONGE survey at the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array using AGD. We find more components per line of sight in 21-SPONGE than in synthetic spectra, which reflects insufficient simulated gas scale heights and the limitations of local box simulations. In addition, we find a significant population of low-optical depth, broad absorption components in the synthetic data which are not seen in 21-SPONGE. This population is not obvious in integrated or per-channel diagnostics, and reflects the benefit of studying velocity-resolved components. The discrepant components correspond to the highest spin temperatures (1000 < Ts < 4000 K), which are not seen in 21-SPONGE despite sufficient observational sensitivity. We demonstrate that our analysis method is a powerful tool for diagnosing neutral interstellar medium conditions, and future work is needed to improve observational statistics and implementation of simulated physics.
Item Details
Item Type: | Refereed Article |
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Keywords: | radio astronomy, galactic structure, interstellar medium, ISM clouds, ISM structure, radio lines |
Research Division: | Physical Sciences |
Research Group: | Astronomical sciences |
Research Field: | Galactic astronomy |
Objective Division: | Expanding Knowledge |
Objective Group: | Expanding knowledge |
Objective Field: | Expanding knowledge in the physical sciences |
UTAS Author: | Dickey, JM (Professor John Dickey) |
ID Code: | 122648 |
Year Published: | 2017 |
Funding Support: | Australian Research Council (DP110104101) |
Web of Science® Times Cited: | 19 |
Deposited By: | Mathematics and Physics |
Deposited On: | 2017-11-21 |
Last Modified: | 2018-04-27 |
Downloads: | 139 View Download Statistics |
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