Speaker
Description
About 50-70% of the first five years of SKA operations will be devoted to KSPs, and probably also to Generic Surveys that maximize commensality to a wide range of scientific objectives. There are already several proposed KSPs focused on Galactic Science and we foresee many other KSP concepts being submitted under the breadth of Our Galaxy SWG.
SKA, providing better sensitivity and angular resolution than any of ongoing/planned surveys of the Galactic plane, will give the opportunity to create a sensitive wide-field atlas of Galactic radio emission and to address several topics in the field of Galactic radioastronomy.
The Galactic plane has always been a formidable challenge for radio interferometers. A concentration of extended sources and the Galactic diffuse emission makes it difficult to obtain a radio map devoid of imaging artefacts. This hampers the imaging performance of the instrument, reducing the quality of the final images (in terms of signal-to-noise ratio) and makes data reduction and analysis a particularly demanding task.
In this paper, we summarize our ongoing work aimed at achieving skills and expertise in the run-up to the development of the full SKA to be ready and competitive for leading and participating in a SKA KSP dedicated to a survey of the Galactic plane and for full exploitation of the survey data.
Our scientific goal is to use state of art radio surveys of the Galactic plane, complemented by targeted observations, to understand the cycle of matter between components of our Galaxy, from star formation in the densest regions of the ISM to the replenishment of the ISM with matter and energy released in the last phases of stellar evolution.
We are currently using radio data from the SCORPIO project (a pathfinder to the EMU an approved ASKAP legacy survey) and from the SARAO MeerKAT Galactic plane survey (SMGPS), from the MWA public survey and from a series of targeted observational projects, carried out with current radio facilities, aimed at testing their feasibility and placing the results in the context of the foreseen capabilities of the SKA.
Major results have been already obtained from the observations of the SCORPIO field conducted in the ASKAP early-science. The comparison with the same areas of the Galactic plane, previously observed with other radio facilities, demonstrates the ASKAP capability of mapping complex sources, at different angular scales, with a trade-off between sensitivity to extended emission and the ability to reveal the finest details.
The SCORPIO project has been designed to forecast the scientific impact of SKA precursors on our view of the Milky Way. At the same time, SCORPIO has been considered as a test-bed to identify, and overcome, technical issues arising from the complex structure of the Galactic plane.
The SCORPIO project has accomplished both its scientific and technical tasks.
| Reasearch area | Our Galaxy |
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