The Arecibo Methanol Maser Galactic Plane Survey. I. Data

Restricted Access. An open-access version is available at arXiv.org (one of the alternative locations)We present the results of an unbiased survey for 6.7 GHz methanol masers in the Galactic plane carried out using the 305 m Arecibo radio telescope. A total of 18.2 deg2 was surveyed with uniform sampling at 35.2deg<=l<=53.7deg, |b|<=0.41deg. The large collecting area of Arecibo and the sensitive C-Band High receiver allowed the survey to be complete at the level of 0.27 Jy, making this the most sensitive blind survey carried out to date. We detected a total of 86 sources, 48 of which are new detections. Most of the new detections have a peak flux density below 2 Jy. Many methanol masers are clustered, reflecting the formation of massive stars in clusters