TL;DR
This study uses innovative stacking of ultraviolet spectra to map the distribution and flow of cool gas around the Milky Way, revealing significant inflow and outflow patterns with spatial variation.
Contribution
It introduces a novel stacking technique to detect low-density gas and provides the first spatially resolved measurements of gas inflow and outflow around the Milky Way.
Findings
Inflowing gas surface density exceeds 10^4.6 M_sun/kpc^2.
Outflowing gas surface density exceeds 10^3.5 M_sun/kpc^2.
Most inflowing gas is confined to small, well-defined structures.
Abstract
We present spatially resolved measurements of cool gas flowing into and out of the Milky Way (MW), using archival ultraviolet spectra of background quasars from the Hubble Space Telescope/Cosmic Origins Spectrograph. We co-add spectra of different background sources at close projected angular separation on the sky. This novel stacking technique dramatically increases the signal-to-noise ratio of the spectra, allowing detection of low column density gas (down to > 2 mA). We identify absorption as inflowing or outflowing, by using blue/redshifted high velocity cloud (HVC) absorption components in the Galactocentric rest frame, respectively. The mass surface densities of inflowing and outflowing gas both vary by more than an order of magnitude across the sky, with mean values of for inflowing gas and…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Code & Models
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
