Related papers: Interstellar water chemistry: from laboratory to o…
Transient microstructure in the diffuse interstellar medium has been observed towards galactic and extragalactic sources for decades, usually in lines of atoms and ions, and, more recently, in molecular lines. Evidently, there is a…
This paper reviews our current understanding of interstellar dust models, what constitutes a viable dust model, what observational constraints are essential for deriving such model, and the current viable dust models. Interstellar dust…
Chemical evolution of galaxies brings together ideas on stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis with theories of galaxy formation, star formation and galaxy evolution, with all their associated uncertainties. In a new perspective brought…
Recent studies of the nearest star-forming clouds of the Galaxy at submillimeter wavelengths with the Herschel Space Observatory have provided us with unprecedented images of the initial and boundary conditions of the star formation…
Dust plays an important role in the evolution of a galaxy, since it is one of the main ingredients for efficient star formation. Dust grains are also a sink/source of metals when they are created/destroyed, and, therefore, a self-consistent…
Context: Existing SWAS observations and future HIFI/Herschel data require a clear sense of the information content of water emission and absorption lines. Aims: Investigate wether the ground-state transition of ortho-H2O, 1_(10)-1_(01), at…
Determining the locations of the major snowlines in protostellar environments is crucial to fully understand the planet formation process and its outcome. Despite being located far enough from the central star to be spatially resolved with…
Over the past decade increasingly robust estimates of the dense molecular gas content in galaxy populations between redshift 0 and the peak of cosmic galaxy/star formation from redshift 1-3 have become available. This rapid progress has…
An outstanding question of astrobiology is the link between the chemical composition of planets, comets, and other solar system bodies and the molecules formed in the interstellar medium. Understanding the chemical and physical evolution of…
Interstellar objects provide the only directly observable samples of icy planetesimals formed around other stars, and can therefore provide insight into the diversity of physical and chemical conditions occurring during exoplanet formation.…
The embedded phase of star formation is the crucial phase where most of the stellar mass is assembled. Velocity-resolved spectra reveal an infalling envelope, bipolar outflows, and perhaps an infant circumstellar disk -- all locked together…
Nearby dwarf irregular galaxies are ideal laboratories for studying the interstellar medium (ISM) at low metallicity, which is expected to be common for galaxies at very high redshift being observed by the James Webb Space Telescope. We…
Bipolar outflows constitute some of the best laboratories to study shock chemistry in the interstellar medium. A number of molecular species have their abundance enhanced by several orders of magnitude in the outflow gas, likely as a…
Icy grain mantles are commonly observed through infrared spectroscopy toward dense clouds, cloud cores, protostellar envelopes and protoplanetary disks. Up to 80% of the available oxygen, carbon and nitrogen are found in such ices; the most…
Observations of star forming environments revealed that the abundances of some deuterated interstellar molecules are markedly larger than the cosmic D/H ratio of 10-5. Possible reasons for this pointed to grain surface chemistry. How- ever,…
Interstellar dust is a significant component of matter in the galaxies. The dust owns its origin and reprocessing in a wide range of astrophysical environments. In order to understand the origin and evolution of the distinct types of…
Observations of interstellar gas-phase and solid-state species in the 2.4-200 micron range obtained with the spectrometers on board the Infrared Space Observatory are reviewed. Lines and bands due to ices, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons,…
Information about the make-up of the galaxy arrives in the Solar system in many forms: photons of different energies, classically collected by ground- and space-based telescopes, neutral and charged atomic particles, and solid macroscopic…
Stars and planets are the fundamental objects of the Universe. Their formation processes, though related, may differ in important ways. Stars almost certainly form from gravitational collapse and probably have formed this way since the…
The abundances of gas and dust (solids and complex molecules) in the interstellar medium (ISM) as well as their composition and structures impact practically all of astrophysics. Fundamental processes from star formation to stellar winds to…