A MUSE map of the central Orion Nebula (M 42)

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive integral-field spectroscopic dataset of the Orion Nebula (M 42) obtained with MUSE, providing detailed spatial and spectral information for astrophysical analysis.

Contribution

The authors provide one of the largest and most detailed integral field mosaics of the Orion Nebula, including data reduction, validation, and derived physical maps, available for community use.

Findings

High-quality extinction and flux maps of the Orion Nebula.

Derived electron temperature and density maps from emission line ratios.

Velocity maps from bright emission lines.

Abstract

We present a new integral-field spectroscopic dataset of the central part of the Orion Nebula (M 42), observed with the MUSE instrument at the ESO VLT. We reduced the data with the public MUSE pipeline. The output products are two FITS cubes with a spatial size of ~5.9'x4.9' (corresponding to ~0.76 pc x 0.63 pc) and a contiguous wavelength coverage of 4595...9366 Angstrom, spatially sampled at 0.2". We provide two versions with a sampling of 1.25 Angstrom and 0.85 Angstrom in dispersion direction. Together with variance cubes these files have a size of 75 and 110 GiB on disk. They represent one of the largest integral field mosaics to date in terms of information content. We make them available for use in the community. To validate this dataset, we compare world coordinates, reconstructed magnitudes, velocities, and absolute and relative emission line fluxes to the literature and find excellent agreement. We derive a two-dimensional map of extinction and present de-reddened flux maps of several individual emission lines and of diagnostic line ratios. We estimate physical properties of the Orion Nebula, using the emission line ratios [N II] and [S III] (for the electron temperature $T_e$) and [S II] and [Cl III] (for the electron density $N_e$), and show two-dimensional images of the velocity measured from several bright emission lines.