SURVEY OF LOCAL CO EMISSION TOWARD COMPACT EXTRAGALACTIC MILLIMETER-WAVE CONTINUUM SOURCES AND IMPLICATIONS FOR LOCAL GALACTIC STRUCTURE

Continuing the quest for lines of sight suitable for millimeter-wave a bsorption studies of local molecular clouds, we searched for galactic CO J = 1-0 line emission toward some 110 compact extragalactic millime ter-wave continuum sources. Together with our earlier survey, we have examined a total of 220 objects with contemporary fluxes of 0.5 Jy or more, essentially the full ensemble of such sources north of -30-degre es declination. This work adds seven directions (for a total of 16), a nd 13 components (totaling 23) to the list of absorption-line candidat es, although emission along two directions had been presented previous ly. Both our source list and the set of inverted-spectrum VLA calibrat ors strongly avoid the galactic plane. The total (CO)-C-12 integrated intensity is again found to be quite small compared to extrapolations of large-scale surveys at low latitudes, but this can now be attribute d to the nearly complete absence of emission at b > 20-degrees. This r eflects a almost-equal-to 200 pc local hole in the local neutral gas. At lower latitudes, the discrepancy is less than a factor 2 and the me an free path for local clouds is not very large (almost-equal-to 1.4 k pc).