3D Distribution of Molecular Gas in the Barred Milky Way

Understand

We present a new model of the three-dimensional distribution of molecular gas in the Milky Way Galaxy, based on CO line data.

• Our analysis is based on a gas-flow simulation of the inner Galaxy using smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) using a realistic barred gravitional potential derived from the observed COBE/DIRBE near-IR light distribution.
• The gas model prescribes the gas orbits much better than a simple circular rotation model and is highly constrained by observations, but it cannot predict local details.
• In this study, we provide a 3D map of the observed molecular gas distribution using the velocity field from the SPH model.