A radio catalog of Galactic HII regions for applications from decimeter to millimeter wavelengths ^*

¹ SISSA, International School for Advanced Studies, via Beirut 2-4, 34014 Trieste, Italy
² IASF, Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica, Sezione di Bologna – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, via Gobetti 101, 40129 Bologna, Italy
³ University of Manchester, Jodrell Bank Observatory, Macclesfield – Cheshire SK11 9DL, UK
⁴ Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste, via G. B. Tiepolo 11, 34131 Trieste, Italy
⁵ Università degli Studi di Milano, via Celoria 16, 20133 Milano, Italy
⁶ IASF, Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica, Sezione di Milano – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, via Bassini 15, 20133 Milano, Italy
⁷ LBNL, SSL, Physics Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

Corresponding author: R. Paladini, paladini@sissa.it

Received: 26 July 2002
Accepted: 1 October 2002

Abstract

By collecting the information from 24 previously published lists and catalogs, we produce a comprehensive catalog (Master Catalog) of 1442 Galactic HII regions. For each object, we quote the original fluxes and diameters as well as the available information on radio line velocities, line widths and line temperatures and the errors on these quantitities. References to the original works are also reported. By exploiting all these data we produce a Synthetic Catalog of fluxes and diameters (with corresponding errors) at 2.7 GHz. This choice is motivated by the extensive, although not complete, information available at this frequency, widely spread among many different catalogs, and by its relevance for both detailed studies on Galactic HII regions and the extrapolation up to millimetric wavelengths. The catalog can be used for detailed studies of Galactic HII regions and, by extrapolation, for investigations of HII regions up to millimetric wavelengths. In particular, we discuss the study of the effects of microwave emission from HII regions on the new generation of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments. We present simulations of the detection of HII regions in the Planck high resolution CMB survey, and briefly analize some of the typical applications of our catalog to the evaluation of CMB anisotropy experiments such as calibration, beam reconstruction and straylight effects. The Master Catalog and the Synthetic Catalog are available via ftp at: cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr. This work is related to Planck-LFI activities.