Catalog of observed tangents to the spiral arms in the Milky Way galaxy
Jacques P Vallee

TL;DR
This paper compiles a comprehensive catalog of observed tangents to the Milky Way's spiral arms using various tracers, analyzes their spatial relationships, and compares findings with spiral arm theories.
Contribution
It presents the first master catalog of mean spiral arm tracers, combining data from multiple sources and revising statistical analyses of arm structure in the Milky Way.
Findings
Mean arm width is approximately 680 parsecs.
Arm tracers can have slightly divergent results, which are averaged.
Confirmed a linear separation between different arm tracers.
Abstract
From the sun's location in the Galactic disk, one can use different arm tracers (CO, HII, thermal or ionized or relativistic electrons, masers, cold or hot dust, etc) to locate a tangent to each spiral arm in the disk of the Milky Way galaxy. We present a Master catalog of the astronomically observed tangents to the Galaxy's spiral arms, using different arm tracers from the literature. Some arm tracers can have slightly divergent results from several papers, so a mean is taken - see Appendix for CO, HII, and masers. The Master catalog of means currently consists of 63 mean tracer entries, spread over many arms (Carina, Crux-Centaurus, Norma, Perseus origin, near 3-kpc, Scutum, Sagittarius), stemming from 107 original arm tracer entries. Additionally, we updated and revised a previous a previous statistical analysis of the angular offset and linear separation from the mid-arm, for each…
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