High-latitude molecular clouds

Citations Over TimeTop 10% of 1984 papers

Abstract

The first results of a program to detect high-latitude, local molecular gas are presented. More than half of the clouds at /b/ greater than 30 deg have been mapped. A large fraction of the clouds are not gravitationally bound. The internal velocity structure implies that many of the clouds are very young with ages of a million years or less. The clouds are invariably associated with atomic hydrogen clouds, but the molecular column densities appear to dominate in many cases. The mean molecular density of the clouds is roughly 170 per cu cm. The one-dimensional cloud-to-cloud velocity dispersion is 5.7 + or - 1.2 km/s. Individual clouds subtend areas from a fraction of a square degree to several square degrees, implying that they may be responsible for at least some of the diffuse high-latitude infrared emission detected by IRAS.

Related Papers

• → Physical Processes in Interstellar Clouds(1987)299 cited
• → The Unusual AGN Host NGC 1266: Evidence for Shocks in a Molecular Gas Rich S0 Galaxy with a Low Luminosity Nucleus(2022)8 cited
• → Diffuse interstellar band formation in dense clouds(1975)2 cited
• → Heavy Element Abundances and Dust Depletions in the Host Galaxies of Three Gamma-Ray Bursts(2002)1 cited
• → The Interstellar Medium(1994)