Related papers: Quantitative inference of the $H_2$ column densiti…
The total mass estimate of molecular clouds suffers from the uncertainty in the H$_2$-CO conversion factor, the so-called $X_{\rm CO}$ factor, which is used to convert the $^{12}$CO (1--0) integrated intensity to the H$_2$ column density.…
We aim to develop a new method to infer the sub-beam probability density function (PDF) of H2 column densities and the dense gas mass within molecular clouds using spatially unresolved observations of molecular emission lines in the 3 mm…
Theoretical and observational investigations have indicated that the abundance of carbon monoxide (CO) is very sensitive to intrinsic properties of the gaseous medium, such as density, metallicity, and the background UV field. In order to…
We report the first ensemble results from the FUSE survey of molecular hydrogen in lines of sight with A_V $\gtrsim$ 1 mag. We have developed techniques for fitting computed profiles to the low-J lines of H2, and thus determining column…
Recent submillimeter and far-infrared wavelength observations of absorption in the rotational ground-state lines of various simple molecules against distant Galactic continuum sources have opened the possibility of studying the chemistry of…
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…
$Aims.$ We characterize the molecular-line emission of three clouds whose star-formation rates span one order of magnitude: California, Perseus, and Orion A. $Methods.$ We use stratified random sampling to select positions representing the…
Using archival, high-resolution far-ultraviolet HST/STIS spectra of 34 Galactic O and B stars, we measure CI column densities and compare them with measurements from the literature of CO and H_2 with regard to understanding the presence of…
According to traditional gas-phase chemical models, O2 should be abundant in molecular clouds, but until recently, attempts to detect interstellar O2 line emission with ground- and space-based observatories have failed. Following the…
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…
Models of pure gas-phase chemistry in well-shielded regions of molecular clouds predict relatively high levels of molecular oxygen, O2, and water, H2O. Contrary to expectation, the space missions SWAS and Odin found only very small amounts…
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…
Constraining the physical and chemical evolution of molecular clouds is essential to our understanding of star formation. These investigations often necessitate knowledge of some local representative number density of the gas along the line…
A reliable estimate of the molecular gas content in galaxies plays a crucial role in determining their dynamical and star-forming properties. However, H2, the dominant molecular species, is difficult to observe directly, particularly in the…
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…
Context: It has been proposed that H$_2$ near-infrared lines may be excited by cosmic rays and allow for a determination of the cosmic-ray ionization rate in dense gas. One-dimensional models show that measuring both the H$_2$ gas column…
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…
We have used archival far-ultraviolet spectra from observations made by HST/STIS and FUSE to determine the column densities and rotational excitation temperatures for CO and H2, respectively, along the lines of sight to 23 Galactic O and B…
$Context.$ The traditional approach to characterize the structure of molecular clouds is to map their line emission. $Aims.$ We aim to test and apply a stratified random sampling technique that can characterize the line emission from…
We present numerical simulations of molecular clouds (MCs) with self-consistent CO gas-phase and isotope chemistry in various environments. The simulations are post-processed with a line radiative transfer code to obtain $^{12}$CO and…