Related papers: H2, CO, and Dust Absorption through Cold Molecular…
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…
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…
Molecular hydrogen (H$_2$) is by far the most abundant molecule in the Universe. However, due to the low emissivity of H$_2$, carbon monoxide (CO) is widely used instead to trace molecular gas in galaxies. The relative abundances of these…
We study four lines of sight that probe the transition from diffuse molecular gas to molecular cloud material in Taurus. Measurements of atomic and molecular absorption are used to infer the distribution of species and the physical…
There is a robust polyatomic chemistry in diffuse, partially-molecular interstellar gas that is readily accessible in absorption at radio/mm/sub-mm wavelengths. Accurate column densities are derived owing to the weak internal excitation, so…
(abridged) We report a study of the relation between dust and gas over a 100deg^2 area in the Taurus molecular cloud. We compare the H2 column density derived from dust extinction with the CO column density derived from the 12CO and 13CO J=…
The direct study of molecular gas in inner protoplanetary disks is complicated by uncertainties in the spatial distribution of the gas, the time-variability of the source, and the comparison of observations across a wide range of…
Data from the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory CO Mapping Survey of the Taurus molecular cloud are combined with extinction data for a sample of 292 background field stars to investigate the uptake of CO from the gas to icy grain…
The relative abundances of atomic and molecular species in planet-forming disks around young stars provide important constraints on photochemical disk models and provide a baseline for calculating disk masses from measurements of trace…
We investigate interstellar absorption from molecular hydrogen (H_2) and metals in an intermediate-velocity cloud (IVC) in the direction of the LMC star Sk -68 80 (HD 36521), based on data from the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer…
The H II region W40 harbors a small group of young, hot stars behind roughly 9 magnitudes of visual extinction. We have detected gaseous carbon monoxide (CO) and diatomic carbon (C_2) in absorption toward the star W40 IRS 1a. The 2-0 R0,…
We combine data from our recent FUSE survey of interstellar molecular hydrogen absorption toward 50 high-latitude AGN with COBE-corrected IRAS 100 micron emission maps to study the correlation of infrared cirrus with H2. A plot of the H2…
I review recent observations of molecular gas in the halo of the Milky Way and in the Magellanic Clouds. Far-ultraviolet absorption line studies of molecular hydrogen (H_2) with ORFEUS and FUSE have unveiled the presence of a diffuse…
Carbon monoxide (CO) is a poor tracer of H$_{2}$ in the diffuse interstellar medium (ISM), where most of the carbon is not incorporated into CO molecules unlike the situation at higher extinctions. We present a novel, indirect method to…
(Abridged) We have used the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) to search for H_2 absorption in five starburst galaxies: NGC 1705, NGC 3310, NGC 4214, M83 (NGC 5236), and NGC 5253. We tentatively detect weak absorption by H_2 in…
H$_{\rm I}$ 21-cm and $^{12}$CO 2.6-mm line emissions respectively trace the atomic and molecular gas phases, but they miss most of the opaque H$_{\rm I}$ and diffuse H$_2$ present in the Dark Neutral Medium (DNM) at the transition between…
ORFEUS far UV echelle spectra have been used to investigate HI, H_2 and CO absorption lines along the line of sight towards LH 10:3120 in the LMC, extending the study presented by de Boer et al. (1998). While H_2 absorption is clearly…
We investigate the correlation between OH and H2 column densities in diffuse Galactic clouds, in order to identify potential molecular tracers of interstellar H2. For this, we analyse near-UV spectra extracted from the ESO/VLT archives…
The most usual tracer of molecular gas is line emission from CO. However, the reliability of that tracer has long been questioned in environments different from the Milky Way. We study the relationship between H2 and CO abundances using a…
We discuss the interstellar absorption from many atomic and molecular species seen in high-resolution $HST$/STIS UV and high-S/N optical spectra of the moderately reddened B3-5~V star HD~62542. This remarkable sight line exhibits both very…