Tentative detection of HCl^+ in diffuse clouds

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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Scientific paper

We report the tentative first detection of HCl+ in the interstellar medium using the HIFI instrument aboard the Herschel Space Observatory. The lowest rotational transition 2P3/2 5/2 - 2P3/2 3/2 of H35Cl+ appears in absorption towards the two Galactic high-mass star forming regions W31C and W49N, observed in the framework of the PRISMAS Herschel key programme. Although they are only minor constituents of the interstellar medium, halogen-containing molecules are of special interest because of their unique thermochemistry. Prior to the launch of Herschel, the H35Cl and H37Cl isotopologues were the only chlorine-containing molecules to have been detected in the ISM while H2Cl+ has been detected for the first time only recently towards NGC 6334I and Sgr B2(S). HCl+ was also expected, as an intermediate step between HCl and H2Cl+, but it remained undetected also in these two sources, probably due to the unstable behavior of HIFI in the frequency range around 1444 GHz. The observations presented here have been taken using five different tunings of the Local Oscillator for both W31C and W49N. Given such redundancy, and comforted by the agreement with models based on a new analysis of the HCl+ spectroscopic parameters, we can safely exclude that the observed features are only due to instrumental artifacts. We will present the data, together with a discussion of the modelling and of the spectroscopic parameters, and will give some preliminary interpretation of the derived column densities.

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