APEX¹, the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment telescope, is located at 5100 metres above sea level on the Chajnantor Plateau in Chile's Atacama region. The ATLASGAL survey took advantage of the unique characteristics of the telescope to provide a detailed² view of the distribution of cold dense³ gas along the plane of the Milky⁴ Way galaxy⁵. The new image includes most of the regions of star formation in the southern Milky Way. The new ATLASGAL maps cover an area of sky 140 degrees long and 3 degrees wide, more than four times larger than the first ATLASGAL release. The new maps are also of higher quality, as some areas were re-observed to obtain a more uniform data quality over the whole survey area.

 

The ATLASGAL survey is the single most successful APEX large programme with nearly 70 associated science papers already published, and its legacy⁶ will expand much further with all the reduced data products now available to the full astronomical⁷ community.

 

At the heart of APEX are its sensitive instruments. One of these, LABOCA (the LArge BOlometer Camera) was used for the ATLASGAL survey. LABOCA measures incoming radiation by registering the tiny rise in temperature it causes on its detectors⁸ and can detect emission⁹ from the cold dark dust bands obscuring the stellar light.

 

The new release of ATLASGAL complements¹⁰ observations from ESA's Planck satellite [5]. The combination of the Planck and APEX data allowed astronomers¹¹ to detect emission spread over a larger area of sky and to estimate from it the fraction of dense gas in the inner Galaxy. The ATLASGAL data were also used to create a complete census¹² of cold and massive clouds where new generations of stars are forming.

 

"ATLASGAL provides exciting insights into where the next generationof high-mass stars and clusters form. By combining these with observations from Planck, we can now obtain a link to the large-scale structures of giant molecular¹³ clouds," remarks Timea Csengeri from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR), Bonn, Germany, who led the work of combining the APEX and Planck data.

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