6 research outputs found
Reanalysis of Copernicus Measurements on Interstellar Carbon Monoxide
We used archival data acquired with the Copernicus satellite to reexamine CO
column densities because self-consistent oscillator strengths are now
available. Our focus is on lines of sight containing modest amounts of
molecular species. Our resulting column densities are small enough that
self-shielding from photodissociation is not occurring in the clouds probed by
the observations. While our sample shows that the column densities of CO and H2
are related, no correspondence with the CH column density is evident. The case
for the CH+ column density is less clear. Recent chemical models for these
sight lines suggest that CH is mainly a by-product of CH+ synthesis in low
density gas. The models are most successful in reproducing the amounts of CO in
the densest sight lines. Thus, much of the CO absorption must arise from denser
clumps along the line of sight to account for the trend with H2.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap
Formation and Fractionation of CO (Carbon Monoxide) in Diffuse Clouds Observed at Optical and Radio Wavelengths
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A Simple and Accurate Network for Hydrogen and Carbon Chemistry in the Interstellar Medium
Chemistry plays an important role in the interstellar medium (ISM), regulating the heating and cooling of the gas and determining abundances of molecular species that trace gas properties in observations. Although solving the time-dependent equations is necessary for accurate abundances and temperature in the dynamic ISM, a full chemical network is too computationally expensive to incorporate into numerical simulations. In this paper, we propose a new simplified chemical network for hydrogen and carbon chemistry in the atomic and molecular ISM. We compare results from our chemical network in detail with results from a full photodissociation region (PDR) code, and also with the Nelson & Langer (NL99) network previously adopted in the simulation literature. We show that our chemical network gives similar results to the PDR code in the equilibrium abundances of all species over a wide range of densities, temperature, and metallicities, whereas the NL99 network shows significant disagreement. Applying our network to 1D models, we find that the CO-dominated regime delimits the coldest gas and that the corresponding temperature tracks the cosmic-ray ionization rate in molecular clouds. We provide a simple fit for the locus of CO-dominated regions as a function of gas density and column. We also compare with observations of diffuse and translucent clouds. We find that the CO, CHx, and OHx abundances are consistent with equilibrium predictions for densities n = 100-1000 cm(-3), but the predicted equilibrium C abundance is higher than that seen in observations, signaling the potential importance of non-equilibrium/dynamical effects