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Description
The WISE Catalog of Galactic HII Regions consists of 8000 Galactic HII regions and HII region candidates selected by searching for their characteristic mid-infrared (MIR) morphology. WISE has sufficient sensitivity to detect the MIR emission from HII regions located anywhere in the Galactic disk. This is the most complete catalog yet of regions forming massive stars in the Milky Way. Of the ~8000 cataloged sources, ~1500 have measured radio recombination line (RRL) or Halpha emission, and are thus known to be HII regions. This sample improves on previous efforts by resolving HII region complexes into multiple sources and by removing duplicate entries. There are ~2500 candidate HII regions in the catalog that are spatially coincident with radio continuum emission. Previous RRL studies show that ~95% of such targets are HII regions. Approximately 500 of these candidates are also positionally associated with known HII region complexes, so the probability of their being bona fide HII regions is even higher. At the sensitivity limits of existing surveys, ~4000 catalog sources show no radio continuum emission. Distances for ~1500 catalog sources and molecular velocities for ~1500 HII region candidates are taken from the literature.
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