The Extended Atlas of Low-resolution Spectra from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite

TL;DR

This paper provides an extensive, updated catalog of low-resolution mid-infrared spectra from IRAS, significantly expanding the dataset and improving spectral quality, serving as a vital resource for galactic and extragalactic studies.

Contribution

It offers the most comprehensive and corrected database of IRAS LRS spectra, including new sources and improved spectral artifacts removal.

Findings

Includes 11,238 spectra, more than double the original dataset.

Enhanced spectral correction removes artifacts at 8 um.

Contains more sources near the Galactic plane.

Abstract

We present an updated atlas of spectra from the Low-Resolution Spectrometer (LRS) on the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), which took spectra from 7.67 to 22.73 um with a spectral resolving power (lambda / Delta lambda) of 20-60. The updated atlas includes 11,238 spectra, including 5425 spectra published in the original LRS Atlas, 5796 spectra published in three later papers, and 17 spectra previously available online but not published. The updated atlas has significantly more sources close to the Galactic plane than the original atlas. We have applied an improved spectral correction to remove an artifact at 8 um in the original database. While the IRAS mission flew over 40 yr ago, the extended LRS atlas remains the single most complete database of mid-infrared spectra of nearby and bright objects in the Galaxy.