Related papers: Calculating Cross Sections of Composite Interstell…
Molecular line emissions are commonly used to trace the distribution and properties of molecular Interstellar Medium (ISM). However, the emissions are heavily blended on the Galactic disk toward the inner Galaxy because of the relatively…
The intergalactic medium (IGM) accounts for ~90% of baryons at all epochs and yet its three dimensional distribution in the cosmic web remains mostly unknown. This is so because the only feasible way to observe the bulk of the IGM is…
Filamentary structure is important for the ISM and star formation. Galactic distribution of filaments may regulate the star formation rate in the Milky Way. However, interstellar filaments are intrinsically complex, making it difficult to…
To date, 204 individual molecular species, comprised of 16 different elements, have been detected in the interstellar and circumstellar medium by astronomical observations. These molecules range in size from two atoms to seventy, and have…
Theoretical spectroscopy is a powerful tool to describe and predict optical properties of materials. While nowadays routinely performed, first-principles calculations only provide bulk dielectric tensors in Cartesian coordinates. These…
Magnetic fields permeate the entire Galaxy and are essential to, for example, the regulation of several stages of the star formation process and cosmic ray transportation. Unraveling its properties, such as intensity and topology, is an…
We present a study of the elemental depletion in the interstellar medium. We combined the results of a Galatic model describing the gas physical conditions during the formation of dense cores with a full-gas-grain chemical model. During the…
We construct models of molecular clouds that are considered as ensembles of transient cores. Each core is assumed to develop in the background gas of the cloud, grow to high density and decay into the background. The chemistry in each core…
This chapter discusses Galactic dust and how its thermal emission confuses CMBR measurements. Interstellar dust grains are composed of many differing species, and observational evidence has only begun to disentagle their composition and…
In this work, exact mathematical expansions for the intrinsic electromagnetic (EM) or optical cross-sections (i.e., extinction, scattering and absorption) for a pair of perfectly conducting circular cylinders in a homogeneous medium are…
We study the effects of using the optical properties of irregular hexahedral grains in photoionization models of circumstellar nebulae around evolved stars. Dust opacities for the irregular grains were obtained from the scattering…
The prevalence of clouds in currently observable exoplanetary atmospheres motivates the compilation and calculation of their optical properties. First, we present a new open-source Mie scattering code known as LX-MIE, which is able to…
We present a new method for using the observed starlight polarization and polarized submm emission to constrain the shapes and porosities of interstellar grains. We present the modified picket fence approximation (MPFA), and verify that it…
We study the efficiency of grain alignment by radiative torques (RATs) for an ensemble of irregular grains. The grains are modeled as ensembles of oblate and prolate spheroids, deformed as Gaussian random ellipsoids, and their scattering…
Context: Observations of scattered light in the 1-5 $\mu$m range have revealed dust grains in molecular cores with sizes larger than commonly inferred for the diffuse interstellar medium. It is currently unclear whether these grains are…
Many recent models consider the structure of individual interstellar medium (ISM) clouds as a way to explain observations of large parts of galaxies. To compare such models to observations, one must understand how to translate between…
A broad array of interstellar absorption features that appear in the ultraviolet spectra of bright sources allows us to measure the abundances and ionization states of many important heavy elements that exist as free atoms in the…
The low density interstellar medium (ISM) close to the Sun and inside of the heliosphere provides a unique laboratory for studying interstellar dust grains. Grain characteristics in the nearby ISM are obtained from observations of…
The magnifications of the images in a strong gravitational lens system are sensitive to small mass clumps in the lens potential; this effect has been used to infer the amount of substructure in galaxy dark matter halos. I study the theory…
We present theoretical calculations of the X-ray scattering properties of porous grain aggregates with olivine monomers. The small and large angle scattering properties of these aggregates are governed by the global structure and…