2010AJ....139.1542M

We present a catalog of 416 extended, resolved, disk and ringlike objects as detected in the MIPSGAL 24 µm survey of the Galactic plane. This catalog is the result of a search in the MIPSGAL image data for generally circularly symmetric, extended "bubbles" without prior knowledge or expectation of their physical nature. Most of the objects have no extended counterpart at 8 µm or 70 µm, with less than 20% detections at each wavelength. For the 54 objects with central point sources, the sources are nearly always seen in all Infrared Array Camera bands. About 70 objects (16%) have been previously identified, with another 35 listed as Infrared Astronomical Satellite sources. Among the identified objects, those with central sources are mostly listed as emission-line stars, but with other source types including supernova remnants (SNRs), luminous blue variables, and planetary nebulae (PNe). The 57 identified objects (of 362) without central sources are nearly all PNe (∼90%), which suggests that a large fraction of the 300+ unidentified objects in this category are also PNe. These identifications suggest that this is primarily a catalog of evolved stars. Also included in the catalog are two filamentary objects that are almost certainly SNRs, and 10 unusual compact extended objects discovered in the search. Two of these show remarkable spiral structure at both 8 µm and 24 µm. These are likely background galaxies previously hidden by the intervening Galactic plane.