Abstract: | We present the Planck Catalogue of Galactic Cold Clumps (PGCC), an all-sky
catalogue of Galactic cold clump candidates detected by Planck. This catalogue
is the full version of the Early Cold Core (ECC) catalogue, which was made
available in 2011 with the Early Release Compact Source Catalogue (ERCSC) and
contained 915 high S/N sources. It is based on the Planck 48 months mission
data that are currently being released to the astronomical community. The PGCC
catalogue is an observational catalogue consisting exclusively of Galactic cold
sources. The three highest Planck bands (857, 545, 353 GHz) have been combined
with IRAS data at 3 THz to perform a multi-frequency detection of sources
colder than their local environment. After rejection of possible extragalactic
contaminants, the PGCC catalogue contains 13188 Galactic sources spread across
the whole sky, i.e., from the Galactic plane to high latitudes, following the
spatial distribution of the main molecular cloud complexes. The median
temperature of PGCC sources lies between 13 and 14.5 K, depending on the
quality of the flux density measurements, with a temperature ranging from 5.8
to 20 K after removing sources with the 1% largest temperature estimates. Using
seven independent methods, reliable distance estimates have been obtained for
5574 sources, which allows us to derive their physical properties such as their
mass, physical size, mean density and luminosity. The PGCC sources are located
mainly in the solar neighbourhood, up to a distance of 10.5 kpc towards the
Galactic centre, and range from low-mass cores to large molecular clouds.
Because of this diversity and because the PGCC catalogue contains sources in
very different environments, the catalogue is useful to investigate the
evolution from molecular clouds to cores. Finally, the catalogue also includes
54 additional sources located in the SMC and LMC. |