English

Atomic and molecular gas in the Milky Way. I. Structure decomposition

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2025-09-23 v1

Abstract

We present GDCluster, a fully automated algorithm for decomposing spectral-line datacube of interstellar gas into coherent structures. Assuming a multi-Gaussian nature of observed spectra, GDCluster employs and augments the derivative spectroscopy technique for precise parameter estimation, incorporates spatial-continuity constraints during spectral fitting, and extends these constraints to spatial clustering. This approach effectively resolves velocity blending structures in PPV space-particularly critical for ubiquitous HI spectra where emissions from multiple phases are severely blended. Applied to the all-sky HI4PI data, a 10 degree times 10 degree CRAFTS survey region, and a 45 degree times 10 degree MWISP survey region, GDCluster extracts 45,299, 2247, and 47,119 structures in HI and CO (1-0), respectively. Comparative analyses demonstrate GDCluster's superiority over DBSCAN in separating overlapping spectra with complex velocity components.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.16572,
  title  = {Atomic and molecular gas in the Milky Way. I. Structure decomposition},
  author = {Xin Liu and Fujun Du},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.16572},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

21 pages, 22 figures