The Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey -- II. Catalog of the Image Data

TL;DR

This paper presents a catalog of 8,358 millimeter dust emission sources from the Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey, providing a valuable resource for studying molecular clumps and star formation in the Galactic plane.

Contribution

It introduces a new catalog of Galactic plane sources extracted with a custom algorithm, improving identification and characterization of molecular clumps.

Findings

Catalog is 98% complete for sources from 0.4 to 60 Jy.

Sources are best described as molecular clumps linked to star formation.

Flux density distribution follows a power law with index -2.4.

Abstract

We present a catalog of 8358 sources extracted from images produced by the Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey (BGPS). The BGPS is a survey of the millimeter dust continuum emission from the northern Galactic plane. The catalog sources are extracted using a custom algorithm, Bolocat, which was designed specifically to identify and characterize objects in the large-area maps generated from the Bolocam instrument. The catalog products are designed to facilitate follow-up observations of these relatively unstudied objects. The catalog is 98% complete from 0.4 Jy to 60 Jy over all object sizes for which the survey is sensitive (<3.5'). We find that the sources extracted can best be described as molecular clumps -- large dense regions in molecular clouds linked to cluster formation. We find the flux density distribution of sources follows a power law with dN/dS ~S^(-2.4 +/- 0.1) and that the mean Galactic latitude for sources is significantly below the midplane: <b>=(-0.095 +/- 0.001) deg.