The IPHAS Catalogue of Halpha Emission Line Sources in the Northern Galactic Plane

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive catalogue of 4853 Halpha emission line point sources in the Northern Galactic Plane from the IPHAS survey, revealing diverse stellar populations and new faint emission objects.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale, deep catalogue of Halpha emitters in the northern Galactic Plane, including spectral confirmation and analysis of their distribution.

Findings

Overdensities near star formation regions

Bimodal distribution of Halpha emission in r'-i'

Less than 10% of sources match known objects

Abstract

We present a catalogue of point-source Halpha emission line objects selected from the INT/WFC Photometric H$\alpha$ Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane (IPHAS). The catalogue covers the magnitude range 13 < r' < 19.5 and includes northern hemisphere sources in the Galactic latitude range -5 < b < 5 degress. It is derived from ~1500 square degress worth of imaging data, which represents 80 percent of the final IPHAS survey area. The electronic version of the catalogue will be updated once the full survey data becomes available. In total, the present catalogue contains 4853 point sources that exhibit strong photometric evidence for Halpha emission. We have so far analyzed spectra for ~300 of these sources, confirming more than 95 percent of them as genuine emission-line stars. A wide range of stellar populations are represented in the catalogue, including early-type emission line stars, active late-type stars, interacting binaries, young stellar objects and compact nebulae. The spatial distribution of catalogue objects shows overdensities near sites of recent or current star formation, as well as possible evidence for the warp of the Galactic plane. Photometrically, the incidence of Halpha emission is bimodally distributed in r'-i'. The blue peak is made up mostly of early-type emission line stars, whereas the red peak may signal an increasing contribution from other objects, such as young/active low-mass stars. We have cross-matched our Halpha-excess catalogue against the emission-line star catalogue of Kohoutek & Wehmeyer, as well as against sources in SIMBAD. We find that fewer than 10 per cent of our sources can be matched to known objects of any type. Thus IPHAS is uncovering an order of magnitude more faint (r' > 13) emission line objects than were previously known in the Milky Way.