Related papers: Oxygen Depletion in the Interstellar Medium: Impli…
There remain many open questions relating to the depletion of elements into dust, e.g., exactly how are C and O incorporated into dust in dense clouds and, in particular, what drives the disappearance of oxygen in the denser interstellar…
We present a study of the elemental depletion in the interstellar medium. We combined the results of a Galatic model describing the gas physical conditions during the formation of dense cores with a full-gas-grain chemical model. During the…
The interstellar medium (ISM) seems to have a significant surplus of oxygen which was dubbed as the "O crisis": independent of the adopted interstellar reference abundance, the total number of O atoms depleted from the gas phase far exceeds…
The observed oxygen abundances in a number of irregular galaxies have been compared with predictions of the closed-box model of chemical and photometric evolution of galaxies. Oxygen is found to be deficient with respect to the predicted…
Context: Dark cloud chemical models usually predict large amounts of O2, often above observational limits. Aims: We investigate the reason for this discrepancy from a theoretical point of view, inspired by the studies of Jenkins and Whittet…
Molecular oxygen has been the subject of many observational searches as chemical models predicted it to be a reservoir of oxygen. Although it has been detected in two regions of the interstellar medium, its rarity is a challenge for…
While it is well recognized that both the Galactic interstellar extinction curves and the gas-phase abundances of dust-forming elements exhibit considerable variations from one sight line to another, as yet most of the dust extinction…
In the interstellar medium of the Milky Way, certain elements -- e.g., Mg, Si, Al, Ca, Ti, Fe -- reside predominantly in interstellar dust grains. These grains absorb, scatter, and emit electromagnetic radiation, heat the interstellar…
Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the universe, but its chemistry in the interstellar medium is still not well understood. In order to critically examine the entire oxygen budget, we attempt here initially to estimate the…
A broad array of interstellar absorption features that appear in the ultraviolet spectra of bright sources allows us to measure the abundances and ionization states of many important heavy elements that exist as free atoms in the…
The wavelength dependences of interstellar extinction and polarization, supplemented by observed elemental abundances and the spectrum of infrared emission from dust heated by starlight, strongly constrain dust models. One dust model that…
The energy to desorb atomic oxygen from an interstellar dust grain surface, $E_{\rm des}$, is an important controlling parameter in gas-grain models; its value impacts the temperature range over which oxygen resides on a dust grain.…
Ultraviolet spectra of stars recorded by orbiting observatories since the 1970's have revealed absorption features produced by atoms in their favored ionization stages in the neutral ISM of our Galaxy. Most elements show abundances relative…
We present new measurements of the interstellar gas-phase oxygen abundance along the sight lines towards 19 early-type galactic stars at an average distance of 2.6 kpc. We derive O {\small I} column densities from {\it HST}/STIS…
Using the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph (GHRS) onboard HST, we have obtained high S/N echelle observations of the weak interstellar O I 1356 A absorption toward the stars Gamma Cas, Epsilon Per, Delta Ori, Epsilon Ori, 15 Mon, Tau…
A study of gas-phase element abundances reported in the literature for 17 different elements sampled over 243 sight lines in the local part of our Galaxy reveals that the depletions into solid form (dust grains) are extremely well…
A substantial fraction of oxygen in diffuse clouds is unaccounted for by observations and is postulated to be in an unknown refractory form, referred to as unidentified depleted oxygen (UDO), which, depending on the local gas density, may…
We consider the depletion of elements from the interstellar gas onto a population of very small dust grains. Adopting a grain model in which of order 4% of the cosmic C abundance is in grains with radii <= 10 Angstroms, we find that the…
Molecular oxygen, O2 has been expected historically to be an abundant component of the chemical species in molecular clouds and, as such, an important coolant of the dense interstellar medium. However, a number of attempts from both ground…
The content of interstellar clouds, in particular the inventory of diffuse molecular gas, remains uncertain. We identified a sample of isolated clouds, approximately 100 solar masses in size, and used the dust content to estimate the total…