Examinations of CO Completeness Based on Three Independent CO Surveys

Abstract

Abstract We report the global properties recovered by an ongoing CO survey of the Milky Way Imaging Scroll Painting (MWISP) toward the Galactic outskirts. Our results are also compared to those extracted by a uniform decomposition method from the CfA 1.2 m CO survey and the FCRAO 14 m outer Galaxy survey (OGS). We find that more extended and unseen structures are present in the MWISP data. The total flux across the disk recovered by the MWISP survey is 1.6 times larger than those recovered by the CfA survey and OGS in the case of the same resolution. The discrepancies are scaling with distance. For example, in the outermost Outer Scutum–Centaurus arm, the flux ratios for MWISP to CfA and MWISP to OGS increase up to 43.8 and 7.4, respectively. Nonetheless, the census of molecular gas in our Galaxy is still far from complete by the MWISP, with flux completeness of <58%. The total mass ratios of the tabulated molecular clouds between different surveys are similar to the CO flux ratio. The application of these ratios to the total H2 mass of our Galaxy yields a correction factor of at least 1.4, meaning that the H2 mass of our Galaxy should be at least 40% more massive than previously determined. Including the completeness correction, an even more significant fraction of the matter should be contributed by baryonic matter. The mass spectrum in the outer Galactic plane is better described by a nontruncating power law with γ = −1.83 ± 0.05 and an upper mass of M 0 = (1.3 ± 0.5) × 106 M ☉.