Related papers: The distances to molecular clouds in the fourth Ga…
We compile and analyze ~200 trigonometric parallaxes and proper motions of molecular masers associated with very young high-mass stars. These measurements strongly suggest that the Milky Way is a four-arm spiral. Fitting log-periodic…
We present BIMA observations of a 2$\arcmin$ field in the northeastern spiral arm of M31. In this region we find six giant molecular clouds that have a mean diameter of 57$\pm$13 pc, a mean velocity width of 6.5$\pm$1.2 \kms, and a mean…
This review describes our current understanding of interstellar extinction. This differ substantially from the ideas of the 20th century. With infrared surveys of hundreds of millions of stars over the entire sky, such as 2MASS,…
We use the ~370 square degrees data from the MWISP CO survey to study the vertical distribution of the molecular clouds (MCs) toward the tangent points in the region of l=[16,52]deg and |b|<5.1deg. The molecular disk consists of two…
Using 3D hydrodynamic calculations we simulate formation of molecular clouds in the Galaxy. The simulations take into account molecular hydrogen chemical kinetics, cooling and heating processes. Comprehensive gravitational potential…
The census of the globular clusters (GCs) in the Milky Way (MW) is still a work in progress. We explore the nature of 19 new GC candidates in the Galactic bulge, based on the analysis of their colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) in the…
The spatial distribution of known globular clusters (GCs) in the Milky Way shows that the current census of GCs is incomplete in the direction of the Galactic plane. We present the discovery of two new GCs located close to the Galactic…
The new generation of IR surveys are revealing and quantifying Galactic features, providing an improved 3-D interpretation of our own Galaxy. We present an analysis of the global distribution of dust clouds in the bulge using the near-IR…
Accurate distances are fundamental to interpreting many measured properties of galaxies. Surprisingly, many of the best-studied spiral galaxies in the Local Volume have distance uncertainties that are much larger than can be achieved with…
The spiral structure of the Milky Way is not yet well determined. The keys to understanding this structure are to increase the number of reliable spiral tracers and to determine their distances as accurately as possible. HII regions, giant…
The mass fraction of dense gas within giant molecular clouds (GMCs) of the Milky Way is investigated using 13CO data from the FCRAO Galactic Plane Surveys and the Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey (BGPS) of 1.1 mm dust continuum emission. A…
We use two existing molecular cloud catalogs derived from the same CO survey and two catalogs derived from local dust extinction surveys to investigate the nature of the GMC mass-size relation in the Galaxy. We find that the four surveys…
We resolve 182 individual giant molecular clouds (GMCs) larger than 2.5 $\times$ 10$^{5}$ \Msun in the inner disks of five large nearby spiral galaxies (NGC 2403, NGC 3031, NGC 4736, NGC 4826, and NGC 6946) to create the largest such sample…
We propose a new method for estimating the distances of molecular clouds traced by CO line emission. Stars from 2MASS and Gaia EDR3 are selected as on-cloud stars when they are projected on a cloud. The background on-cloud stars have redder…
We have used H alpha narrow-band imaging to search for star-forming satellite galaxies around 143 luminous spiral galaxies, with the goal of quantifying the frequency of occurrence of satellites resembling the Magellanic Clouds, around…
For about two decades, a population of relative small and nearby molecular clouds has been known to exist at high Galactic latitudes. Lying more than 10$^\circ$ from the Galactic plane, these clouds have typical distances of $\sim$150 pc,…
A population of molecular clouds with a significantly greater scale height than that of Giant Molecular Clouds has been identified by examining maps of the latitude distribution of the $^{12}CO(1-0)$ emission in the first quadrant of the…
The principle of the background-eliminated extinction-parallax (BEEP) method is examining the extinction difference between on- and off-cloud regions to reveal the extinction jump caused by molecular clouds, thereby revealing the distance…
We present a three-dimensional (3D) extinction map of the southern sky. The map covers the SkyMapper Southern Survey (SMSS) area of $\sim$ 14,000 ${\rm deg^{2}}$ and has spatial resolutions between 6.9 and 27 arcmin. Based on the multi-band…
We present a detailed analysis comparing the velocity fields in molecular clouds and the atomic gas that surrounds them in order to address the origin of the gradients. To that end, we present first-moment intensity-weighted velocity maps…