Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2016

45 MAY-JUNE 2016 SPACE CHRONICLES data products now available to the full astronomical 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 radia- tion by registering the tiny rise in temperature it causes on its detec- tors and can detect emission from the cold dark dust bands obscuring the stellar light. The new release of ATLASGAL complements observa- tions from ESA's Planck and Her- schel satellites. The combination of the Planck and APEX data allowed astronomers 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 census of cold and massive clouds where new gen- erations of stars are forming. “ATLASGAL provides exciting in- sights into where the next genera- tion of high-mass stars and clusters form. By combining these with ob- servations from Planck, we can now obtain a link to the large-scale struc- tures of giant molecular clouds,” re- marks Timea Csengeri from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astron- omy (MPIfR), Bonn, Germany, who led the work of combining the APEX and Planck data. The APEX telescope recently cele- brated ten years of successful re- search on the cold Universe. It plays an important role not only as path- finder, but also as a complementary facility to ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, which is also located on the Chaj- nantor Plateau. APEX is based on a prototype antenna constructed for the ALMA project, and it has found many targets that ALMA can study in great detail. Leonardo Testi from ESO, who is a member of the ATLASGAL team and the European Project Scientist for the ALMA project, concludes: “AT- LASGAL has allowed us to have a new and transformational look at the dense interstellar medium of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The new release of the full survey opens up the possibility to mine this marvel- lous dataset for new discoveries. Many teams of scientists are already using the ATLASGAL data to plan for detailed ALMA follow-up.” T he APEX telescope in Chile has mapped the full area of the Galactic Plane visible from the south- ern hemisphere at submilli- metre wavelengths — be- tween infrared light and radio waves. The APEX data, at a wavelength of 0.87 millimetres, shows up in red and the background blue image was imaged at shorter infrared wave- lengths by the NASA Spit- zer Space Telescope as part of the GLIMPSE survey. The fainter extended red structures come from com- plementary observations made by ESA's Planck sat- ellite. Many of the most prominent objects are named and the parts of the galaxy that are shown in the three slices are indi- cated at the right. [ESO/ APEX/ATLASGAL consor- tium/NASA/GLIMPSE con- sortium/ESA/Planck] n