Related papers: The Mysterious Radcliffe Wave
High-velocity clouds (HVCs) are interstellar gas clouds whose velocities are incompatible with Galactic rotation. Since the first discovery of HVCs in 1963, their origins have been debated for decades but are still not settled down, because…
The envelopes of stars near the Eddington limit are prone to various instabilities. A high Eddington factor in connection with the Fe opacity peak leads to convective instability, and a corresponding envelope inflation may induce…
The nature of our Milky Way Galaxy is reexamined from an eclectic point of view. Evidence for a central bar, for example, is not reflected in the distribution of RR Lyrae variables in the central bulge [4,5], and it is not clear if either a…
Evidence for wave-like corrugations are well established in the Milky Way and in nearby disc galaxies. These were originally detected as a displacement of the interstellar medium about the midplane, either in terms of vertical distance or…
We present high-spatial-resolution ($\sim 0\farcs2$, or $\sim$3\,pc) CO(2--1) observations of the nearest young starburst dwarf galaxy, NGC\,5253, taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. We have identified 118 molecular…
Previous HST and FUSE observations have revealed highly ionized high-velocity clouds (HVCs) or more generally low HI column HVCs along extragalactic sightlines over 70-90% of the sky. The distances of these HVCs have remained largely…
Molecular clouds in the central molecular zone (CMZ) have been observed to feature turbulent line widths that are significantly higher, and scale with cloud size more steeply, than in the rest of the Milky Way. In the same Galactic region,…
It appears that the majority of rapidly-, well-localized gamma-ray bursts with undetected, or dark, optical afterglows, or `dark bursts' for short, occur in clouds of size R > 10L_{49}^{1/2} pc and mass M > 3x10^5L_{49} M_{sun}, where L is…
The center of the Milky Way galaxy (MW) is an extreme environment which contains a massive black hole surrounded by a very dense star cluster, two other adjacent star clusters, and a giant molecular cloud which would serve as an incubator…
We review the physics and phenomenology of wave dark matter: a bosonic dark matter candidate lighter than about 30 eV. Such particles have a de Broglie wavelength exceeding the average inter-particle separation in a galaxy like the Milky…
RCW120 is a Galactic HII region having a beautiful ring shape bright in infrared. Our new CO J=1-0 and J=3-2 observations performed with the NANTEN2, Mopra, and ASTE telescopes have revealed that two molecular clouds with a velocity…
Sulfur dioxide is a radiatively and chemically important trace gas in the atmosphere of Venus and its abundance at the cloud-tops has been observed to vary on interannual to decadal timescales. This variability is thought to come from…
The Milky Way lies in a thin plane, the Local Sheet, a part of a wall bounding the Local Void lying toward the north supergalactic pole. Galaxies with accurate distances both above and below this supergalactic equatorial plane have…
Green Bank Telescope (GBT) 21cm observations have revealed a faint, yet extensive HI cloud population surrounding the Andromeda Galaxy (M31). The newfound objects are likely analogs to the high-velocity HI clouds (HVCs) seen around the…
In this contribution the current state of knowledge about the high-velocity clouds (HVCs) is summarized. Recent progress has shown that the HVCs are a diverse phenomenon. The intermediate-velocity clouds (IVCs) are likely to be part of a…
Though flux freezing is a good approximation frequently assumed for molecular clouds, ambipolar diffusion (AD) is inevitable at certain scales. The scale at which AD sets in can be a crucial parameter for turbulence and the star formation…
We use spectroscopic data from HST and FUSE to study the wide range of ionization states of the "highly ionized high-velocity clouds". Studied extensively in OVI absorption, these clouds are usually assumed to be infalling gas in the…
The peculiar radial velocities of eight clusters of galaxies, as determined from a variety of distance indicators, are consistent with a bulk flow not greatly different in direction and magnitude from the velocity vector of the Local Group…
Recent studies have revealed an oscillating asymmetry in the vertical structure of the Milky Way's disc. Here we analyze 16 high-resolution, fully cosmological simulations of the evolution of individual Milky Way-sized galaxies, carried out…
From our catalog of Milky Way molecular clouds, created using a temperature thresholding algorithm on the Bell Laboratories 13CO Survey, we have extracted two subsets:(1) Giant Molecular Clouds (GMCs), clouds that are definitely larger than…