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Highlights - volume 504-2 (September III 2009)

Details: Published on 07 September 2009

HIGHLIGHTS: this week in A&A

Volume 504-2 (September III 2009)

In section 5. Galactic structure, stellar clusters, and populations

“ATLASGAL - The APEX telescope large area survey of the galaxy at 870 microns”, by F. Schuller, K. M. Menten, Y. Contreras, et al., A&A 504, p. 415

The APEX telescope and its recently commissioned bolometer LABOCA have been used to begin a survey of the Milky Way at 870 microns (ATLASGAL). This first release reveals ¡6000 compact sources, or 63 sources per square degree, as well as extended filaments. The survey highlights young protostellar objects and massive star formation.

In section 13. Astronomical instrumentation

“Source detection using a 3D Sparse representation: application to the Fermi gamma-ray space telescope”, by J.-L. Starck, J.M. Fadili, S. Digel, B. Zhang, and J. Chiang, A&A 504, p. 641

Gamma ray telescopes measure both the angular position and the energy of photons, in a regime where point source fluxes are low compared to the diffuse background and where the angular resolution varies tremendously with photon energy. These characteristics make source detection a non-trivial proposition. This paper develops a multivariate data processing procedure that combines transformations meant to render count (Poisson) data approximately normal with wavelet denoising methods, in data-spaces of 2 or more dimensions. The resulting algorithm is very fast compared to traditional likelihood model fitting and permits efficient detection across the time dimension and immediate estimation of spectral properties.

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