Related papers: H2 distribution during formation of multiphase mol…
The existence of substellar cold H2 globules in planetary nebulae and the mere existence of comets suggest that the physics of cold interstellar gas might be much richer than usually envisioned. We study the case of a cold gaseous medium in…
Atomic gas in the diffuse interstellar medium (ISM) is organized in filamentary structures. These structures usually host cold and dense molecular clumps. The Galactic magnetic field is considered to play an important role in the formation…
Measurements of molecular hydrogen (H_2) column densities are presented for the first six rotational levels (J=0 to 5) for 73 extragalactic targets observed with FUSE. All of these have a final signal-to-noise ratio larger than \snlimit,…
We investigate the formation of molecular hydrogen (H_2) in a primordial H+He gas cloud irradiated by a power-law UV flux. We find that at high densities (>1 cm^{-3}) and low temperatures (<10^4 K), the background radiation enhances the…
Molecular clouds (MCs) are highly structured and ``turbulent''. Colliding gas streams of atomic hydrogen have been suggested as a possible source of MCs, imprinting the filamentary structure as a consequence of dynamical and thermal…
We have recently developed a post-processing framework to estimate the abundance of atomic and molecular hydrogen (HI and H2, respectively) in galaxies in large-volume cosmological simulations. Here we compare the HI and H2 content of…
We extend recent numerical results (Dobbs et. al. 2006) on molecular cloud formation in spiral galaxies by including a multi-phase medium. The addition of a hot phase of gas enhances the structure in the cold gas, and significantly…
We present a novel framework to self-consistently model the effects of radiation fields, dust physics and molecular chemistry (H$_2$) in the interstellar medium (ISM) of galaxies. The model combines a state-of-the-art radiation…
Molecular Cloud Complexes (MCCs) are highly structured and ``turbulent''. Observational evidence suggests that MCCs are dynamically dominated systems, rather than quasi-equilibrium entities. The observed structure is more likely a…
Complex turbulent motions of magnetized gas are ubiquitous in the interstellar medium. The source of this turbulence, however, is still poorly understood. Previous work suggests that compression caused by supernova shockwaves, gravity, or…
We study the formation of giant dense cloud complexes and of stars within them by means of SPH numerical simulations of the mildly supersonic collision of gas streams (``inflows'') in the warm neutral medium (WNM). The resulting…
The diffuse interstellar medium is dynamic, and its chemistry and evolution is determined by shock fronts as well as photodissociation. Shocks are implied by the supersonic motions and velocity dispersion often statistically called…
We study the evolution of molecular hydrogen on the grain surfaces and in the gas phase using both the rate equation (which tracks the average number of molecules) and the master equation (which tracks the expectation values of molecules).…
We have developed a code that models the formation, destruction, radiative transfer, and vibrational/rotational excitation of H_2 in a detailed fashion. We discuss how such codes, together with FUSE observations of H_2 in diffuse and…
We know little about the outermost portions of galaxies because there is little light coming from them. We do know that in many cases atomic hydrogen (HI) extends well beyond the optical radius \cite{Casertano91}. In the centers of…
We examine several different simplified approaches for modelling the chemistry of CO in three-dimensional numerical simulations of turbulent molecular clouds. We compare the different models both by looking at the behaviour of integrated…
The modelling of emission spectra of molecules seen in interstellar clouds requires the knowledge of collisional rate coefficients. Among the commonly observed species, N$_2$H$^+$ is of particular interest since it was shown to be a good…
The internal energy available in vibrationally excited H2 molecules can be used to overcome or diminish the activation barrier of various chemical reactions of interest for molecular astrophysics. In this article we investigate in detail…
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…
Knowledge of the molecular component of the ISM is fundamental to understand star formation. The H2 component appears to dominate the gas mass in the inner parts of galaxies, while the HI component dominates in the outer parts. Observation…