Related papers: Molecular hydrogen and its proxies HCO$^+$ and CO …
Interstellar CO2 is an important reservoir of carbon and oxygen, and one of the major constituents of the icy mantles of dust grains, but it is not observable directly in the cold gas because has no permanent dipole moment. Its protonated…
We have constructed three-dimensional models for the equilibrium abundance of molecular hydrogen within diffuse interstellar clouds of arbitrary geometry that are illuminated by ultraviolet radiation. The position-dependent photo-…
We investigate the chemical evolution of a forming molecular cloud behind an interstellar shock wave. We conduct three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamics simulations of the converging flow of atomic gas, including a simple chemical network…
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…
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 present a semi-analytical description of the relative HD/H2 abundance in the diffuse interstellar medium. We found three asymptotics of the relative HD/H$_2$ abundance for different parts of the medium and their dependence on the…
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…
The environment around protoplanetary disks (PPDs) regulates processes which drive the chemical and structural evolution of circumstellar material. We perform a detailed empirical survey of warm molecular hydrogen (H$_2$) absorption…
This study is aimed to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the molecular hydrogen distribution in the galaxy M33 by introducing novel methods for generating high angular resolution (18.2$''$, equivalent to 75 pc) column…
Aims. The comparative study of several molecular species at the origin of the gas phase chemistry in the diffuse interstellar medium (ISM) is a key input in unraveling the coupled chemical and dynamical evolution of the ISM. Methods. The…
The gravitational lens toward B0218+357 offers the unique possibility to study cool moderately dense gas with high sensitivity and angular resolution in a cloud that existed half a Hubble time ago. Observations of the radio continuum and…
Observations of various molecular lines toward a disk region of a nearby galaxy are now feasible, and they are being employed as diagnostic tools to study star-formation activities there. However, the spatial resolution attainable for a…
We modelled \HH\ and CO formation incorporating the fractionation and selective photodissociation affecting CO when \AV\ $\la2$mag. UV absorption measurements typically have N(\cotw)/N(\coth) $\approx 65$ that are reproduced with the…
H2 column densities towards CO clouds in the LMC and SMC are estimated from their far-infrared surface brightness and HI column density. N(H2)/I(CO) conversion factors are X(LMC) = 1.3 and X(SMC) = 12 (unit: 10**21 mol cm**-2 (K km/s)**-1).…
The 21 cm hyperfine transition of the atomic hydrogen (HI) in ground state is a powerful probe of the neutral gas content of the universe. This radio frequency transition has been used routinely for decades to observe, both in emission and…
We show in this paper why molecular millimeter absorption line searches in DLAs have been unsuccessful. We use CO emission line maps of local galaxies to derive the H2 column density distribution function f(N_H2) at z=0. We show that it…
Observations of CO+ suggest column densities on the order 10^12 cm^-2 that can not be reproduced by many chemical models. CO+ is more likely to be destroyed than excited in collisions with hydrogen. An anomalous excitation mechanism may…
The HIFI instrument on board the Herschel Space Observatory has been used to observe interstellar nitrogen hydrides along the sight-line towards G10.6-0.4 in order to improve our understanding of the interstellar chemistry of nitrogen. We…
Observations of the cosmic evolution of different gas phases across time indicate a marked increase in the molecular gas mass density towards $z\sim 2-3$. Such a transformation implies an accompanied change in the global distribution of…
The rotational transitions of carbon monoxide (CO) are the primary means of investigating the density and velocity structure of the molecular interstellar medium. Here we study the lowest four rotational transitions of CO towards…