The bandmerged Planck Early Release Compact Source Catalogue: Probing sub-structure in the molecular gas at high Galactic latitude

TL;DR

This paper presents a bandmerged catalogue of Planck ERCSC sources, analyzes their spectral energy distributions, and finds evidence of CO emission from molecular gas clumps at high Galactic latitudes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel bandmerging algorithm for Planck sources and provides the first evidence of high-latitude CO emission contributing to the 100 GHz flux.

Findings

Detection of CO emission contributing 4.5% to 100 GHz flux in 147 sources

Identification of molecular gas clumps with total mass exceeding 2000 solar masses

Development of spectral energy distributions across nine Planck frequencies

Abstract

The Planck Early Release Compact Source Catalogue (ERCSC) includes nine lists of highly reliable sources, individually extracted at each of the nine Planck frequency channels. To facilitate the study of the Planck sources, especially their spectral behaviour across the radio/infrared frequencies, we provide a "bandmerged" catalogue of the ERCSC sources. This catalogue consists of 15191 entries, with 79 sources detected in all nine frequency channels of Planck and 6818 sources detected in only one channel. We describe the bandmerging algorithm, including the various steps used to disentangle sources in confused regions. The multi-frequency matching allows us to develop spectral energy distributions of sources between 30 and 857 GHz, in particular across the 100 GHz band, where the energetically important CO J=1->0 line enters the Planck bandpass. We find ~3-5sigma evidence for contribution to the 100 GHz intensity from foreground CO along the line of sight to 147 sources with |b|>30 deg. The median excess contribution is 4.5+/-0.9 percent of their measured 100 GHz flux density which cannot be explained by calibration or beam uncertainties. This translates to 0.5+/-0.1 K km s^{-1} of CO which must be clumped on the scale of the Planck 100 GHz beam, i.e., ~10 arcmin. If this is due to a population of low mass (~15 Msun) molecular gas clumps, the total mass in these clumps may be more than 2000 Msun. Further, high-spatial-resolution, ground-based observations of the high-latitude sky will help shed light on the origin of this diffuse, clumpy CO emission.