The JCMT Plane Survey: early results from the l = 30 degree field

TL;DR

This paper reports early results from the JCMT Plane Survey's l=30 degree region, detecting over a thousand compact sources in the Galactic plane, analyzing their properties and star-forming activity.

Contribution

It presents initial data, source extraction, and analysis of star-forming regions in the JCMT Plane Survey, focusing on the l=30 degree field.

Findings

Detected 1029 sources above 5-sigma threshold

Sources are consistent with ATLASGAL survey detections

Star-forming clumps in W43 appear younger than average

Abstract

We present early results from the JCMT Plane Survey (JPS), which has surveyed the northern inner Galactic plane between longitudes l=7 and l=63 degrees in the 850-{\mu}m continuum with SCUBA-2, as part of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope Legacy Survey programme. Data from the l=30 degree survey region, which contains the massive star-forming regions W43 and G29.96, are analysed after approximately 40% of the observations had been completed. The pixel-to-pixel noise is found to be 19 mJy/beam, after a smooth over the beam area, and the projected equivalent noise levels in the final survey are expected to be around 10 mJy/beam. An initial extraction of compact sources was performed using the FellWalker method resulting in the detection of 1029 sources above a 5-{\sigma} surface-brightness threshold. The completeness limits in these data are estimated to be around 0.2 Jy/beam (peak flux density) and 0.8 Jy (integrated flux density) and are therefore probably already dominated by source confusion in this relatively crowded section of the survey. The flux densities of extracted compact sources are consistent with those of matching detections in the shallower ATLASGAL survey. We analyse the virial and evolutionary state of the detected clumps in the W43 star-forming complex and find that they appear younger than the Galactic-plane average.