Galactic Ionizing Radiation Field

We have been collaborating with Joss Bland-Hawthorn at the University of Sydney to develop new 3D models of the Galactic ionizing radiation field. This field is used as an input to photoionization models of gas clouds in the Galactic halo, which are needed to determine the physical properties and chemical properties of halo clouds. It represents a step forward over models that use the extragalactic background radiation. The figure below shows the 2014 model of the radiation field published in Fox et al. (2014), with solid lines showing the contours of contant ionizing (blue) and non-ionizing (red) flux. An earlier version was published in 2005 in Fox et al. (2005), with the original version presented in Bland-Hawthorn & Maloney (1999). Our former group member Dhanesh Krishnarao developed a Python tool (named galrad) for extracting the radiation field along any given MW halo sightline. galrad is available on github here.