Filaments in the inner Galactic plane from ATLASGAL

A systematical study of the large-scale filaments toward their physical parameters, distribution, structures, and kinematics will inform us about which types of filaments have the potential to form stars, how the material feeds protostars through filaments, and the connection between star formation and Galactic spiral arms.

Unlike the traditional by-eye searches, we use a customized minimum spanning tree algorithm to identify filaments by linking Galactic clumps from the APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy catalog. In the inner Galactic plane (|l|<60{deg}), we identify 163 large-scale filaments with physical properties derived, including the dense-gas mass fraction, and we compare them with an updated spiral arm model in position-position-velocity space.