Related papers: The CO-to-H2 Conversion Factor
We present a new observational study of the CO(1-0) line emission as an H2 gas mass tracer under extreme conditions in extragalactic environments. Our approach is to study the full neutral interstellar medium (H2, HI and dust) of two…
The rotational transitions of carbon monoxide (CO) are the primary means of investigating the density and velocity structure of the molecular interstellar medium. Here we study the lowest four rotational transitions of CO towards…
Context. There are significant amounts of H2 in the Milky Way. Due to its symmetry H2 does not radiate at radio frequencies. CO is thought to be a tracer for H2, however CO is formed at significantly higher opacities than H2. Thus, toward…
The large scale structure and physics of molecular gas in the Galactic center region is discussed based on the analysis of a 9' resolution survey of the Galactic center region in the J=1->0 line of C^18O. Emphasis is placed on the…
The current generation of (sub)mm-telescopes has allowed molecular line emission to become a major tool for studying the physical, kinematic, and chemical properties of extragalactic systems, yet exploiting these observations requires a…
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…
Observations of various molecular lines toward a disk region of a nearby galaxy are now feasible, and they are being employed as diagnostic tools to study star-formation activities there. However, the spatial resolution attainable for a…
There is now strong evidence suggesting that the 12CO J = 1-0 transition, widely used to trace H2 gas, significantly underestimates its mass in metal-poor regions. In spiral disks such regions are found in large galactocentric distances…
We present $^{12}$CO(J=1--0) line observations of 22 low-luminosity spiral galaxies in the Virgo cluster. These data, together with 244 others available in the literature, allow us to build a large sample that we use to study the molecular…
The spatial distribution of the gaseous components of the Milky Way is of great importance for a number of different fields, for example, Galactic structure, star formation, and cosmic rays. However, obtaining distance information to…
Determining how galactic environment, especially the high gas densities and complex dynamics in bar-fed galaxy centers, alters the star formation efficiency (SFE) of molecular gas is critical to understanding galaxy evolution. However,…
The mass of molecular gas in an interstellar cloud is often measured using line emission from low rotational levels of CO, which are sensitive to the CO mass, and then scaling to the assumed molecular hydrogen H_2 mass. However, a…
We present the results of a high angular resolution, multi-transition analysis of the molecular gas in M82. The analysis is based on the two lowest transitions of 12CO and the ground transition of the rare isotopes 13CO and C18O measured…
In recent decades, significant attention has been dedicated to analytical and observational studies of the atomic hydrogen (HI) to molecular hydrogen (H2) transition in the interstellar medium. We focussed on the Draco diffuse cloud to gain…
We devise a physical model of formation and distribution of molecular gas clouds in galaxies. We use the model to predict the intensities of rotational transition lines of carbon monoxide (CO) and the molecular hydrogen (H$_{\rm 2}$)…
Carbon monoxide (CO) provides crucial information about the molecular gas properties of galaxies. While $^{12}$CO has been targeted extensively, isotopologues such as $^{13}$CO have the advantage of being less optically thick and…
The CO-to-H$_2$ conversion factor ($\alpha_\mathrm{CO}$) is expected to vary with dust abundance and grain size distribution through the efficiency of shielding gas from CO-dissociation radiation. We present a comprehensive analysis of…
The process of atomic-to-molecular (HI-to-H$_2$) gas conversion is fundamental for molecular-cloud formation and star formation. 21 cm observations of the star-forming region W43 revealed extremely high HI column densities, of 120-180…
A deep, wide-field, near-infrared imaging survey was used to construct an extinction map of the southeastern part of the California Molecular Cloud (CMC) with $\sim$ 0.5 arc min resolution. The same region was also surveyed in the…
In a previous paper, we calculated numerical hydrodynamic models of the interstellar medium in the Galaxy, which suggested that hot gas (T $\ge$ 3 $\times$ 10$^5$ K) has a filling factor near 50\% in the midplane (Rosen \& Bregman 1995, ApJ…