The Outer Disk of the Milky Way Seen in 21-cm Absorption

Three recent surveys of 21-cm line emission in the Galactic plane, combining single dish and interferometer observations to achieve resolution of 1 arcmin to 2 arcmin, 1 km/s, and good brightness sensitivity, have provided some 650 absorption spectra with corresponding emission spectra for study of the distribution of warm and cool phase H I in the interstellar medium. These emission-absorption spectrum pairs are used to study the temperature of the interstellar neutral hydrogen in the outer disk of the Milky Way, outside the solar circle, to a radius of 25 kpc. The cool neutral medium is distributed in radius and height above the plane with very similar parameters to the warm neutral medium. In particular, the ratio of the emission to the absorption, which gives the mean spin temperature of the gas, stays nearly constant with radius to 25 kpc radius. This suggests that the mixture of cool and warm phases is a robust quantity, and that the changes in the interstellar environment do not force the H I into a regime where there is only one temperature allowed. The mixture of atomic gas phases in the outer disk is roughly 15% to 20% cool (40 K to 60 K), the rest warm, corresponding to mean spin temperature 250 to 400 K. The Galactic warp appears clearly in the absorption data, and other features on the familiar longitude-velocity diagram have analogs in absorption with even higher contrast than for 21-cm emission. In the third and fourth Galactic quadrants the plane is quite flat, in absorption as in emission, in contrast to the strong warp in the first and second quadrants. The scale height of the cool gas is similar to that of the warm gas, and both increase with Galactic radius in the outer disk.

💡 Research Summary

This paper presents a comprehensive study of the neutral hydrogen (H I) temperature structure in the outer Mil‑Way disk, extending from the solar circle out to a Galactocentric radius of 25 kpc. The authors combine three recent 21‑cm line surveys that merge single‑dish and interferometric data, achieving an angular resolution of 1–2 arcmin, a spectral resolution of 1 km s⁻¹, and sufficient brightness sensitivity to detect both emission and absorption. From these surveys they extract roughly 650 paired emission‑absorption spectra, each providing a direct measurement of the H I spin temperature along a given line of sight.

The methodology hinges on the relationship between the observed brightness temperature T_B(v) of the emission line and the optical depth τ(v) derived from the absorption profile. By computing T_s(v)=T_B(v)/