Related papers: Understanding the physics of the X-factor
We present models of CO(1-0) emission from Milky Way-mass galaxies at redshift zero in the FIRE-2 cosmological zoom-in simulations. We calculate the molecular abundances by post-processing the simulations with an equilibrium chemistry…
We study the properties of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) from a smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulation of a portion of a spiral galaxy, modelled at high resolution, with robust representations of the physics of the interstellar medium.…
We present Herschel PACS observations of the [CII] 158 micron emission line in a sample of 24 intermediate mass (9<logM$_\ast$/M$_\odot$<10) and low metallicity (0.4< Z/Z$_\odot$<1.0) galaxies from the xCOLD GASS survey. Combining them with…
We study the molecular content and the star formation efficiency of 21 Blue Compact Dwarfs (BCDs). We present CO(1-0) and (2-1) observations, further supplemented with additional CO measurements and multiwavelength ancillary data from the…
Gas in galactic disks is collected by gravitational instabilities into giant atomic-molecular complexes, but only the inner, molecular parts of these structures are able to collapse to form stars. Determining what controls the ratio of…
We study the relationship between molecular gas and dust in the California Molecular Cloud over an unprecedented dynamic range of cloud depth (Av = 3 - 60 magnitudes). We compare deep Herschel-based measurements of dust extinction with…
There are two major theoretical issues for the star formation law (the relation between the surface densities of molecular gas and star formation rate on a galaxy scale): (i) At low metallicity, it is not obvious that star-forming regions…
Planck cold clumps are among the most promising objects to investigate the initial conditions of the evolution of molecular clouds. In this work, by combing the dust emission data from the survey of Planck satellite with the molecular data…
We measure the parsec-scale relationship between integrated CO intensity (I_CO) and visual extinction (A_V) in 24 local molecular clouds using maps of CO emission and dust optical depth from Planck. This relationship informs our…
Nearby spiral galaxies show an extremely tight correlation between tracers of molecular hydrogen (H_2) in the interstellar medium (ISM) and tracers of recent star formation, but it is unclear whether this correlation is fundamental or…
Carbon-bearing molecules, particularly CO, have been widely used as tracers of molecular gas in the interstellar medium (ISM). In this work, we aim to study the properties of molecules in diffuse, cold environments, where CO tends to be…
We study the magnetic field to density ($B-\rho$) relation in turbulent molecular clouds with dynamically important magnetic fields using nonideal three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations. Our simulations show that there is a…
We measure the CO-to-H$_2$ conversion factor ($\alpha_\mathrm{CO}$) in 37 galaxies at 2~kpc resolution, using dust surface density inferred from far-infrared emission as a tracer of the gas surface density and assuming a constant…
The abundance of H2 in molecular clouds, relative to the commonly used tracer CO, has only been measured toward a few embedded stars, which may be surrounded by atypical gas. We present observations of near-infrared absorption by H2, CO,…
Understanding stellar birth requires observations of the clouds in which they form. These clouds are dense and self-gravitating, and in all existing observations, they are molecular with H_2 the dominant species and CO the best available…
Using the atomic carbon [CI](1$-$0) and [CI](2$-$1) emission maps observed with the $Herschel\ Space\ Observatory$, and CO(1$-$0), HI, infrared and submm maps from literatures, we estimate the [CI]-to-H$_2$ and CO-to-H$_2$ conversion…
[abridged] We determine the relationship between turbulence energy and gas density variance for 15 molecular clouds in the Solar neighbourhood. We use the linewidths of the CO molecule as the probe of the turbulence energy (sonic Mach…
We use UV measurements of interstellar CO towards nearby stars to calculate the density in the diffuse molecular clouds containing the molecules responsible for the observed absorption. Chemical models and recent calculations of the…
We study the metallicity dependence of the H/H$_2$ and C$^+$/C/CO distributions in a self-regulated interstellar medium (ISM) across a broad range of metallicities ($0.1 < Z/Z_\odot < 3$). To this end, we conduct high-resolution (particle…
We utilize a modified astrochemistry code which includes cosmic ray attenuation in-situ to quantify the impact of different cosmic-ray models on the CO-to-H$_2$ and CI-to-H$_2$ conversion factors, $X_{\rm CO}$ and $X_{\rm CI}$,…