English

A Possible Extension of the Scutum-Centaurus Arm into the Outer Second Quadrant

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2015-06-23 v1

Abstract

Combining HI data from the Canadian Galactic Plane Survey~(CGPS) and CO data from the Milky Way Imaging Scroll Painting (MWISP) project, we have identified a new segment of a spiral arm between Galactocentric radii of 15 and 19~kpc that apparently lies beyond the Outer Arm in the second Galactic quadrant. Over most of its length, the arm is 400-600 pc thick in zz. The new arm appears to be the extension of the distant arm recently discovered by Dame & Thaddeus (2011) as well as the Scutum-Centaurus Arm into the outer second quadrant. Our current survey identified a total of 72 molecular clouds with masses on the order of 102^2-104^4M\sun_{\sun} that probably lie in the new arm. When all of the available data from the CO molecular clouds are fit, the best-fitting spiral model gives a pitch angle of 9.3^{\circ} ±\pm0.7^{\circ}.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1412.2425,
  title  = {A Possible Extension of the Scutum-Centaurus Arm into the Outer Second Quadrant},
  author = {Yan Sun and Ye Xu and Ji Yang and Fa Cheng Li and Xin Yu Du and Shao Bo Zhang and Xin Zhou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.2425},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

11 pages, 3 figures; Accepted for publication in ApJ Letters

R2 v1 2026-06-22T07:23:01.515Z