Related papers: Putting the Diffuse Interstellar Bands on the map …
We have used spectra of hot stars from the RAVE Survey in order to investigate the visibility and properties of five diffuse interstellar bands previously reported in the literature. The RAVE spectroscopic survey for Galactic structure and…
The Warm Ionized Medium (WIM), also referred to as Diffuse Ionized Gas, contains most of the mass of interstellar medium in ionized form, contributing as much as 30% of the total atomic gas mass in the solar neighborhood. The advent of CCDs…
The properties of dust in the interstellar medium (ISM) nearest the Sun are poorly understood because the low column densities of dust toward nearby stars induce little photometric reddening, rendering the grains largely undetectable.…
The cosmic infrared background (CIB) sourced by infrared emission from dusty star-forming galaxies is a valuable source of information on the star formation history of the Universe. In measurements of the millimeter sky at frequencies…
We study the behavior of eight diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs) in different interstellar environments, as characterized by the fraction of hydrogen in molecular form [$f$(H$_2$)], with comparisons to the corresponding behavior of various…
In this paper, we present new data with interstellar C2 (Phillips bands A-X), from observations made with the Ultraviolet-Visual Echelle Spectrograph of the European Southern Observatory. We have determined the interstellar column densities…
Interstellar dust is still a dominant uncertainty in Astronomy, limiting precision in e.g., cosmological distance estimates and models of how light is re-processed within a galaxy. When a foreground galaxy serendipitously overlaps a more…
The interstellar thick disks of galaxies contain not only gas, but significant quantities of dust. Most of our knowledge of extraplanar dust in disk galaxies comes from direct broadband optical imaging of these systems, wherein the dust is…
The interstellar medium (ISM) provides a unique laboratory for highly supersonic, driven hydrodynamics turbulence. We present a theory of such turbulence, confirm it by numerical simulations, and use the results to explain observational…
Conventional interpretation of the observed cosmic microwave background (CMB) dipole is that all of it is produced by local peculiar motions. Alternative explanations requiring part of the dipole to be primordial have received support from…
Several of the current and next-generation cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments have polarimetric capability, promising to add to the finesse of precision cosmology. One of the contaminating Galactic foregrounds is thermal emission…
Interstellar matter (ISM) sets the boundary conditions of the heliosphere and dominates the interplanetary medium. The heliosphere configuration has varied over recent history, as the Sun emerged from the Local Bubble and entered a…
The study of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is a rapidly maturing field. In remarkable advances in the past two years, experiments have begun to probe the detailed structure of the CMB angular spectrum thereby providing insight into…
We measure the smoothness of the infrared sky using the COBE DIRBE maps, and obtain interesting limits on the production of the diffuse cosmic infrared background (CIB) light by matter clustered like galaxies. The predicted fluctuations of…
Infrared observations of hot massive stars and their environments provide a detailed picture of mass loss histories, dust formation, and dynamical interactions with the local stellar medium that can be unique to the thermal regime. We have…
It has not been shown so far whether the diffuse Galactic polarized emission at frequencies relevant for cosmic microwave background (CMB) studies originates from nearby or more distant regions of our Galaxy. This questions previous…
We present high-resolution (R~15000) VLT/UVES optical spectra of two planetary nebulae (PNe; Tc 1 and M 1-20) where C60 (and C70) fullerenes have already been found. These spectra are of high-quality (S/N > 300) for PN Tc 1, which permits…
3D maps of the ISM can be used to locate not only IS clouds, but also IS bubbles between the clouds that are blown by stellar winds and supernovae. We compare our 3D maps of the IS dust to the ROSAT diffuse X-ray background maps. In the…
The origin of the diffuse interstellar bands is one of the longest-standing mysteries of the interstellar medium is explored within the framework of The Heterogeneous dust Evolution Model at the IaS (THEMIS). The likely nature of the…
The Wisconsin H-Alpha Mapper (WHAM) is a new facility dedicated to the study of faint optical emission lines from diffuse interstellar gas. During its first 18 months of operation, WHAM carried out a survey of the interstellar H-alpha…