Unfortunately, the dusty
galactic plane cuts right through this empty sector, obscuring any galaxies it might possess.
Brian presented a set of observations made looking across the
galactic plane. The technique is for the aerial to track the target while the receiver is tuned across a range of frequencies spanning the hydrogen emission line.
Dickinson et al., "A derivation of the free-free emission on the
Galactic plane between Z = 20[degrees] and 44[degrees]" Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol.
About 80 papers cover instrumentation; interstellar matter and molecular clouds; the
galactic plane and star formation; stellar magnetic fields; stars and circumstellar matter; solar systems and exoplanets; and supernovae, extragalactic, and cosmic microwave background polarimetry.
If you could look at the Milky Way edge-on, like a phonograph record from the side, you'd see that the bulge extends both above and below the
galactic plane like an orange at the record's center--an orange about 8,000 light-years across.
So dense are the clouds of dust and gas in the
galactic plane that our view of the central region is almost totally obscured.
Some chapter topics include observations of interstellar and circumstellar ice, the
galactic plane source populations revealed by AKARI, 3D dynamics of interactions between stellar winds and the interstellar medium, and near-infrared spectroscopy of brown dwarfs with AKARI.
Eleven of these regions lie directly in the
galactic plane, as shown in Figure 4.
2 GHz can be found in relative abundance along the Milky Way
galactic plane and are seen spectroscopically as whirling maser pockets with halo structures of 2- 300 AU in diameter.