Hunting for the signatures of molecular cloud formation

In order to understand how molecular clouds form in the Galactic interstellar medium, we would like to be able to map the structure and kinematics of the gas flows responsible for forming them. However, doing so is observationally challenging. CO, the workhorse molecule for studies of molecular clouds, traces only relatively dense gas and hence only allows us to study those portions of the clouds that have already assembled. Numerical simulations suggest that the inflowing gas that forms these clouds is largely composed of CO-dark H2. These same simulations allow us to explore the usefulness of different tracers of this CO-dark molecular material, and we use them here to show that the [CII] fine structure line is potentially a very powerful tracer of this gas and should be readily detectable using modern instrumentation.