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Oxford University Press, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 3(448), p. 2344-2361, 2015

DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stv178

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MALT-45: a 7 mm survey of the southern Galaxy – I. Techniques and spectral line data

This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

We present the first results from the MALT-45 (Millimetre Astronomer's Legacy Team - 45 GHz) Galactic Plane survey. We have observed 5 square-degrees (l=330−335, b=±0.5) for spectral lines in the 7 mm band (42-44 and 48-49 GHz), including CS (1−0), class I CH3OH masers in the 7(0,7)−6(1,6) A+ transition and SiO (1−0) v=0,1,2,3. MALT-45 is the first unbiased, large-scale, sensitive spectral line survey in this frequency range. In this paper, we present data from the survey as well as a few intriguing results; rigorous analyses of these science cases are reserved for future publications. Across the survey region, we detected 77 class I CH3OH masers, of which 58 are new detections, along with many sites of thermal and maser SiO emission and thermal CS. We found that 35 class I CH3OH masers were associated with the published locations of class II CH3OH, H2O and OH masers but 42 have no known masers within 60 arcsec. We compared the MALT-45 CS with NH3 (1,1) to reveal regions of CS depletion and high opacity, as well as evolved star-forming regions with a high ratio of CS to NH3. All SiO masers are new detections, and appear to be associated with evolved stars from the Spitzer Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire (GLIMPSE). Generally, within SiO regions of multiple vibrational modes, the intensity decreases as v=1,2,3, but there are a few exceptions where v=2 is stronger than v=1.