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The precise characteristics of clouds and the nature of dust in the diffuse interstellar medium can only be extracted by inspecting the rare cases of single-cloud sightlines. In our nomenclature such objects are identified by interstellar lines, such as K I, that show at a resolving power of $lambda /Delta lambda sim 75,000$ one dominating Doppler component that accounts for more than half of the observed column density. We searched for such sightlines using high-resolution spectroscopy towards reddened OB stars for which far-UV extinction curves are known. We compiled a sample of 186 spectra, 100 of which were obtained specifically for this project with UVES. In our sample we identified 65 single-cloud sightlines, about half of which were previously unknown. We used the CH/CH$^+$ line ratio of our targets to establish whether the sightlines are dominated by warm or cold clouds. We found that CN is detected in all cold (CH/CH$^+ >1$) clouds, but is frequently absent in warm clouds. We inspected the WISE ($3-22, mu$m) observed emission morphology around our sightlines and excluded a circumstellar nature for the observed dust extinction. We found that most sightlines are dominated by cold clouds that are located far away from the heating source. For 132 stars, we derived the spectral type and the associated spectral type-luminosity distance. We also applied the interstellar Ca II distance scale, and compared these two distance estimates with GAIA parallaxes. These distance estimates scatter by 40%. By comparing spectral type-luminosity distances with those of GAIA, we detected a hidden dust component that amounts to a few mag of extinction for eight sightlines. This Dark Dust is populated by $ge 1 mu$m large grains and predominately appears in the field of the cold interstellar medium.
It is well known that the dust properties of the diffuse interstellar medium exhibit variations towards different sight-lines on a large scale. We have investigated the variability of the dust characteristics on a small scale, and from cloud-to-cloud
We compare the structure of molecular gas at $40$ pc resolution to the ability of gas to form stars across the disk of the spiral galaxy M51. We break the PAWS survey into $370$ pc and $1.1$ kpc resolution elements, and within each we estimate the mo
Observations of interstellar dust are often used as a proxy for total gas column density $N_mathrm{H}$. By comparing $textit{Planck}$ thermal dust data (Release 1.2) and new dust reddening maps from Pan-STARRS 1 and 2MASS (Green et al. 2018), with ac
The large majority of extinction sight lines in our Galaxy obey a simple relation depending on one parameter, the total-to-selective extinction coefficient, Rv. Different values of Rv are able to match the whole extinction curve through different env
We report on an analysis of the gas and dust budget in the the interstellar medium (ISM) of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Recent observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope enable us to study the mid-infrared dust excess of asymptotic giant bra