| 10th of February 2016 |
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| The Parkes HI Zone of Avoidance Survey |
| by Anja Schröder (SAAO) |
| A blind HI survey of the extragalactic sky
behind the southern Milky Way has been conducted with the multibeam receiver
on the 64-m Parkes radio telescope. The survey covers the Galactic longitude
range 212 degr < l < 36 degr and Galactic latitudes |b| < 5 degr to an rms
sensitivity of 6 mJy per beam per 27 km/s channel, and yields 883 galaxies to
a recessional velocity of 12,000 km/s (Staveley-Smith et al. 2016). The survey
covers the sky within the
HI Parkes All-Sky Survey (HIPASS) area to greater sensitivity, finding lower
HI-mass galaxies at all distances, and probing more completely the large-scale
structures at and beyond the distance of the Great Attractor. The image above - made by PhD student Khaled Said - shows the HI detections on the dust map (top) and on the continuum map (bottom; Calabretta et al. 2014), proving that the Parkes HI Zone of Avoidance Survey (HIZOA) is not affected by dust and only little by continuum emission in the foreground. Reference: Staveley-Smith, Kraan-Korteweg, Schröder, Henning, Koribalski, Stewart and Heald 2016, AJ 151, 52 Press Release: "Scientists discover hidden galaxies behind the Milky Way", CSIRO blog: Hidden galaxies, a Great Attractor and other wonders of the Zone of Avoidance, Scitech: Playing hide and seek with the Great Attractor", Science News:Australian astronomers have spotted a cluster of galaxies being pulled in by a mysterious force |