A molecular cloud, sometimes called a stellar nursery (if star formation is occurring within), is a type of interstellar cloud, the density and size of which permit absorption nebulae, the formation of molecules (most commonly molecular hydrogen, H2), and the formation of H II regions. This is in contrast to other areas of the interstellar medium that contain predominantly ionized gas.
A nebula is a distinct luminescent part of interstellar medium, which can consist of ionized, neutral, or molecular hydrogen and also cosmic dust. Nebulae are often star-forming regions, such as in the "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebula. In these regions, the formations of gas, dust, and other materials "clump" together to form denser regions, which attract further matter and eventually become dense enough to form stars. The remaining material is then thought to form planets and other planetary system objects.
In astronomy, the interstellar medium (ISM) is the matter and radiation that exist in the space between the star systems in a galaxy. This matter includes gas in ionic, atomic, and molecular form, as well as dust and cosmic rays. It fills interstellar space and blends smoothly into the surrounding intergalactic space. The energy that occupies the same volume, in the form of electromagnetic radiation, is the interstellar radiation field. Although the density of atoms in the ISM is usually far below that in the best laboratory vacuums, the mean free path between collisions is short compared to typical interstellar lengths, so on these scales the ISM behaves as a gas (more precisely, as a plasma: it is everywhere at least slightly ionized), responding to pressure forces, and not as a collection of non-interacting particles.
An H II region or HII region is a region of interstellar atomic hydrogen that is ionized. It is typically in a molecular cloud of partially ionized gas in which star formation has recently taken place, with a size ranging from one to hundreds of light years, and density from a few to about a million particles per cubic centimetre. The Orion Nebula, now known to be an H II region, was observed in 1610 by Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc by telescope, the first such object discovered.
Robert Woodrow Wilson is an American astronomer who, along with Arno Allan Penzias, discovered cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) in 1964. The pair won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery.
Edward Mills Purcell was an American physicist who shared the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for his independent discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance in liquids and in solids. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) has become widely used to study the molecular structure of pure materials and the composition of mixtures. Friends and colleagues knew him as Ed Purcell.
In the fields of Big Bang theory and cosmology, reionization is the process that caused electrically neutral atoms in the universe to reionize after the lapse of the "dark ages".
In astronomical spectroscopy, the Lyman-alpha forest is a series of absorption lines in the spectra of distant galaxies and quasars arising from the Lyman-alpha electron transition of the neutral hydrogen atom. As the light travels through multiple gas clouds with different redshifts, multiple absorption lines are formed.
The hydrogen line, 21 centimeter line, or H I line is a spectral line that is created by a change in the energy state of solitary, electrically neutral hydrogen atoms. It is produced by a spin-flip transition, which means the direction of the electron's spin is reversed relative to the spin of the proton. This is a quantum state change between the two hyperfine levels of the hydrogen 1 s ground state. The electromagnetic radiation producing this line has a frequency of 1420.405751768(2) MHz (1.42 GHz), which is equivalent to a wavelength of 21.106114054160(30) cm in a vacuum. According to the Planck–Einstein relation E = hν, the photon emitted by this transition has an energy of 5.8743261841116(81) μeV [9.411708152678(13)×10−25 J]. The constant of proportionality, h, is known as the Planck constant.
In astronomical spectroscopy, the Gunn–Peterson trough is a feature of the spectra of quasars due to the presence of neutral hydrogen in the Intergalactic medium (IGM). The trough is characterized by suppression of electromagnetic emission from the quasar at wavelengths less than that of the Lyman-alpha line at the redshift of the emitted light. This effect was originally predicted in 1965 by James E. Gunn and Bruce Peterson.
In astronomy, extinction is the absorption and scattering of electromagnetic radiation by dust and gas between an emitting astronomical object and the observer. Interstellar extinction was first documented as such in 1930 by Robert Julius Trumpler. However, its effects had been noted in 1847 by Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve, and its effect on the colors of stars had been observed by a number of individuals who did not connect it with the general presence of galactic dust. For stars that lie near the plane of the Milky Way and are within a few thousand parsecs of the Earth, extinction in the visual band of frequencies is roughly 1.8 magnitudes per kiloparsec.
The ethynyl radical (systematically named λ3-ethyne and hydridodicarbon(C—C)) is an organic compound with the chemical formula C≡CH (also written [CCH] or C
2H). It is a simple molecule that does not occur naturally on Earth but is abundant in the interstellar medium. It was first observed by electron spin resonance isolated in a solid argon matrix at liquid helium temperatures in 1963 by Cochran and coworkers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. It was first observed in the gas phase by Tucker and coworkers in November 1973 toward the Orion Nebula, using the NRAO 11-meter radio telescope. It has since been detected in a large variety of interstellar environments, including dense molecular clouds, bok globules, star forming regions, the shells around carbon-rich evolved stars, and even in other galaxies.
The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) is a science instrument that was installed on the Hubble Space Telescope during Servicing Mission 4 (STS-125) in May 2009. It is designed for ultraviolet (90–320 nm) spectroscopy of faint point sources with a resolving power of ≈1,550–24,000. Science goals include the study of the origins of large scale structure in the universe, the formation and evolution of galaxies, and the origin of stellar and planetary systems and the cold interstellar medium. COS was developed and built by the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy (CASA-ARL) at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation in Boulder, Colorado.
The cyano radical (or cyanido radical) is a radical with molecular formula CN, sometimes written •CN. The cyano radical was one of the first detected molecules in the interstellar medium, in 1938. Its detection and analysis was influential in astrochemistry. The discovery was confirmed with a coudé spectrograph, which was made famous and credible due to this detection. ·CN has been observed in both diffuse clouds and dense clouds. Usually, CN is detected in regions with hydrogen cyanide, hydrogen isocyanide, and HCNH+, since it is involved in the creation and destruction of these species (see also Cyanogen).
Wouthuysen–Field coupling, or the Wouthuysen–Field effect, is a mechanism that couples the excitation temperature, also called the spin temperature, of neutral hydrogen to Lyman-alpha radiation. This coupling plays a role in producing a difference in the temperature of neutral hydrogen and the cosmic microwave background at the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of the epoch of reionization. It is named for Siegfried Adolf Wouthuysen and George B. Field.
The photon underproduction crisis is a cosmological discussion concerning the purported deficit between observed photons and predicted photons.
Argonium (also called the argon hydride cation, the hydridoargon(1+) ion, or protonated argon; chemical formula ArH+) is a cation combining a proton and an argon atom. It can be made in an electric discharge, and was the first noble gas molecular ion to be found in interstellar space.
In cosmology, the missing baryon problem is an observed discrepancy between the amount of baryonic matter detected from shortly after the Big Bang and from more recent epochs. Observations of the cosmic microwave background and Big Bang nucleosynthesis studies have set constraints on the abundance of baryons in the early universe, finding that baryonic matter accounts for approximately 4.8% of the energy contents of the Universe. At the same time, a census of baryons in the recent observable universe has found that observed baryonic matter accounts for less than half of that amount. This discrepancy is commonly known as the missing baryon problem. The missing baryon problem is different from the dark matter problem, which is non-baryonic in nature.
TON 618 is a hyperluminous, broad-absorption-line, radio-loud quasar and Lyman-alpha blob located near the border of the constellations Canes Venatici and Coma Berenices, with the projected comoving distance of approximately 18.2 billion light-years from Earth. It possesses one of the most massive black holes ever found, at 40 billion M☉.
Harold Irving "Doc" Ewen was an American physicist, radio astronomer, and business executive. He served in the United States Navy in World War II as a second lieutenant. As a graduate student under Edward M. Purcell, he was the first to detect the galactic 21-cm hydrogen line.
