Related papers: Exotic clouds in the local interstellar medium
Stars form within molecular clouds but our understanding of this fundamental process remains hampered by the complexity of the physics that drives their evolution. We review our observational and theoretical knowledge of molecular clouds…
{It has recently been proposed that giant molecular complexes form at the sites where streams of diffuse warm atomic gas collide at transonic velocities.} {We study the global statistics of molecular clouds formed by large scale colliding…
In this article I review recent observations of the gaseous halos of galaxies and the intergalactic medium at low redshift. In the first part I discuss distribution, metal content, and physical properties of the Galactic intermediate- and…
Context. A large fraction of the interstellar medium can be characterized as a multiphase medium. The neutral hydrogen gas is bistable with a cold and warm neutral medium (CNM and WNM respectively) but there is evidence for an additional…
Spectra obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope GHRS are combined with high-resolution optical spectra and UV spectra from Copernicus to study the abundances and physical conditions in the diffuse interstellar clouds seen along the line of…
We investigate numerically the role of thermal instability (TI) as a generator of density structures in the interstellar medium (ISM), both by itself and in the context of a globally turbulent medium. Simulations of the instability alone…
Turbulent diffuse molecular clouds can exhibit complicated morphologies caused by the interactions among radiation, chemistry, fluids, and fields. We performed full 3D simulations for turbulent diffuse molecular interstellar media,…
The wavelength range 912-2000A (hereafter far-UV) provides access to absorption lines of the interstellar medium (ISM), circumgalactic medium (CGM), and intergalactic medium (IGM) in phases spanning a wide range of ionization, density,…
Cool cluster cores are in global thermal equilibrium but are locally thermally unstable. We study a nonlinear phenomenological model for the evolution of density perturbations in the ICM due to local thermal instability and gravity. We have…
We model the conservation of energy in the framework of the thin layer approximation for two types of interstellar medium (ISM). In particular, we analyse an ISM in the presence of self-gravity and a Gaussian ISM which produces an asymmetry…
Possible origins of the molecular absorption discovered in some ULIRGs are investigated, based on a 3-D hydrodynamic model of star-forming interstellar gas in a galactic central region. The blue-shifted, warm ($\sim 200-300$ K), dense…
The radio frequency 1.4 GHz transition of the atomic hydrogen is one of the important tracers of the diffuse neutral interstellar medium. Radio astronomical observations of this transition, using either a single dish telescope or an array…
Astrophysical gases such as the interstellar-, circumgalactic- or intracluster-medium are commonly multiphase, which poses the question of the structure of these systems. While there are many known processes leading to fragmentation of cold…
Very sensitive HI absorption spectra (tau RMS about 10^-4 over 1 km/s) toward high latitude QSOs have revealed a population of tiny discrete features in the diffuse ISM with peak tau of 0.1 - 2% and core line-widths corresponding to…
Observations have shown that the optical colors of Galactic cirrus clouds differ significantly from those of extragalactic sources; thus, they can be used to distinguish Galactic cirrus from extragalactic low surface brightness (LSB)…
Several neutral species (MgI, SiI, CaI, FeI) have been detected in a weak MgII absorption line system (W_r(2796)~0.15 Angstroms) at z~0.45 along the sightline toward HE0001-2340. These observations require extreme physical conditions, as…
The Solar System is located within a low-density cavity, known as the Local Bubble, which appears to be filled with an X-ray emitting gas at a temperature of 10$^6$ K. Such conditions are too harsh for typical interstellar atoms and…
We study the dynamics of phase transitions in the interstellar medium by means of three-dimensional hydrodynamic numerical simulations. We use a realistic cooling function and generic nonequilibrium initial conditions to follow the…
The Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) has shown the complexity of the Galactic center (GC) Interstellar medium (ISM) detecting, not only large column densities of warm molecular gas (H2), but the emission of neutral atoms and ions of low…
Molecular hydrogen clouds are a key component of the interstellar medium because they are the birthplaces for stars. They are embedded in atomic gas that pervades the interstellar space. However, the details of how molecular clouds assemble…