Face-on Map of the Molecular Disc and 3-kpc Expanding Ring of the Galaxy based on a High-Accuracy Rotation Curve

TL;DR

This paper presents a new method to accurately map the Milky Way's molecular disc by accounting for non-circular motions, specifically the 3-kpc expanding ring, improving face-on galactic structure visualization.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel approach that incorporates non-circular motions into face-on mapping, addressing the near-far degeneracy problem in kinematic distance estimation.

Findings

Successfully mapped the 3-kpc expanding ring in face-on view.

Showed the importance of considering non-circular motions for accurate galactic mapping.

Demonstrated the method's effectiveness on archival CO-line data.

Abstract

We analyze the longitude-velocity diagram (LVD) of the CO-line emission from archival data and use the most accurate rotation curve (RC) of the Milky Way to transform radial velocity to face-on position in the Galactic plane. We point out that the face-on transformation is highly sensitive to the adopted RC, especially in the inner Milky Way, in the sense that deviations of the RC from the true rotation velocity yield an artifact hole or overcrowded concentration along the tangent circle for over- or under-estimated RC. Even if the RC is sufficiently accurate, non-circular motion such as with the 3 kpc expanding ring causes significant artifacts in the resulting face-on-map as long as a circular rotation is assumed. On the other hand, if we properly take into account the non-circular motion, it can be used to solve the near-far degeneracy problem of determination of kinematic distance. We thus propose a new method to solve the degeneracy by incorporating the expanding motion of a ring or arms. We apply the method to the LVD of the 3-kpc expanding ring and present its face-on map projected onto the galactic plane for the first time.