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E. B. Churchwell (U of Wisconsin-Madison), R.A. Benjamin (U of Wisconsin-Whitewater), GLIMPSE Team
GLIMPSE (Galactic Legacy Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire) is a Spitzer Legacy Science Program to use IRAC to map the inner Galactic plane in the region 10 > |l| > 65o and |b| < 1o . With the exception of one small strip in the outer southern Galactic plane, the survey is now complete. The first version of the GLIMPSE Point Source Catalog contains ~30 million entries and the GLIMPSE Point Source Archive contains ~48 million entries. We present the distributions of stars as a function of longitude, latitude, and magnitude. We find that the source distribution as a function of longitude can be fit by an exponential function of the form N(m, |l|)=No(m) e-|l|/l_{sc} where N is the number of sources per arcmin2. When we account for systematic uncertainties, we find no difference in the angular scale length, lsc in the northern (l=10-65o) and southern (l = 295 – 350o) segments of the survey. We find that the northern plane has a substantially larger number of sources than the southern plane in the longitude range |l| ~14 to ~30o. The excess population becomes particularly clear at magnitudes fainter than ~11.5 and has the earmarks the central bar (Gerhard 2001). Support for this work, part of the Spitzer Space Telescope Legacy Science Program, was provided by NASA through contract number 1224653 to UW-Madison and 1256801 to UW-Whitewater.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 37 #2
© 2005. The American Astronomical Soceity.