HI4PI: The Hydrogen Sky
Image Credit:
Benjamin Winkel & the
HI4PI Collaboration
Where are the Milky Way's gas clouds and where are they going?
To help answer this question, a
new highest-resolution map
of the sky in the universe's
most abundant gas --
hydrogen -- has been completed and
recently released, along with its
underlying data.
Featured
above,
the all-sky map of hydrogen's
21-cm emission shows abundance with brightness and speed with color.
Low
radial speeds toward us artificially colored blue and low radial speeds away colored green.
The band across the middle is the
plane of our Milky Way Galaxy,
while the bright spots on the lower right are the neighboring
Magellanic Clouds.
The HI4PI map collects data from over one million observations with the northern
Effelsberg 100-Meter Radio Telescope in
Germany and
the southern
Parkes 64-Meter Radio Telescope in Australia, also known as
"The Dish".
The details of the map not only better inform humanity about
star formation and
interstellar gas in our
Milky Way galaxy,
but also how much light
this local gas is likely to absorb when
observing the outside universe.
Many details on the map are
not yet well understood.