Survey of Ionized Gas of the Galaxy, Made with the Arecibo telescope (SIGGMA): Inner Galaxy Data Release (1901.10849v1)

Abstract: The Survey of Ionized Gas of the Galaxy, Made with the Arecibo telescope (SIGGMA) provides a fully-sampled view of the radio recombination line (RRL) emission from the portion of the Galactic plane visible by Arecibo. Observations use the Arecibo L-band Feed Array (ALFA), which has a FWHM beam size of 3.4 arcmin. Twelve hydrogen RRLs from H163$\alpha$ to H174$\alpha$ are located within the instantaneous bandpass from 1225 MHz to 1525 MHz. We provide here cubes of average ("stacked") RRL emission for the inner Galaxy region $32 \le \ell \le 70$ degrees, $|b|\le1.5$ degree, with an angular resolution of 6 arcmin. The stacked RRL rms at 5.1 km/s velocity resolution is $\sim0.65$ mJy beam$^{-1}$, making this the most sensitive large-scale fully-sampled RRL survey extant. We use SIGGMA data to catalogue 319 RRL detections in the direction of 244 known HII regions, and 108 new detections in the direction of 79 HII region candidates. We identify 11 Carbon RRL emission regions, all of which are spatially coincident with known HII regions. We detect RRL emission in the direction of 14 of the 32 supernova remnants (SNRs) found in the survey area. This RRL emission frequently has the same morphology as the SNRs. The RRL velocities give kinematic distances in agreement with those found in the literature, indicating that RRLs may provide an additional tool to constrain distances to SNRs. Finally, we analyze the two bright star-forming complexes: W49 and W51. We discuss the possible origins of the RRL emission in directions of SNRs W49B and W51C.