Revealing X_CO and the CIB: globally modelling dust and gas in the Milky Way

Mon, October 12, 2015

The IRAS discovery of infrared cirrus clouds was the starting point of correlation studies of neutral atomic hydrogen and dust far-infrared emission. These yield important insights into the gas and dust physics, the accretion history of the Milky Way, the X_CO factor, and the distribution of the CO-dark molecular gas. So far, full-sky analyses were limited by the angular resolution of the HI data of about one degree. The recently finished Effelsberg-Bonn HI Survey (EBHIS) improved this limit by an order of magnitude. Here, we aim to consistently quantify the relation between dust and gas, using the most accurate full-sky data sets. Moreover, a Bayesian framework and state-of-the-art methods of inference and image analyses allow us to deduce all-sky maps of e.g. the X_CO factor, dust emissivity, (CO-dark) molecular gas and the Cosmic Infrared Background. We present the first results of this work and compare our results with targeted observations.