Herschel/HIFI Observations Of The Galactic Center's Molecular World*

Details Herschel/HIFI Observations Of The Galactic Center's Molecular World* Herschel/HIFI Observations Of The Galactic Center's Molecular World*

May 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21810806s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #218, #108.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011

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Scientific paper

Because of its unique thermo-chemistry, fluorine is the only atom in the periodic table that can react exothermically with H2 to form a hydride. An implication of this is that HF will be the dominant reservoir of fluorine wherever the interstellar H2/atomic H ratio exceeds 1 (Neufeld, Wolfire & Schilke 2005; Neufeld & Wolfire 2009). The recent detections of strong HF absorptions toward a large number of Herschel sources indicate that HF is ubiquitous in the diffuse interstellar medium and that HF can be used as a valuable surrogate tracer of molecular hydrogen, as predicted. In this work we present new Herschel/HIFI observations of the gas clouds associated with the +50 km/s Giant Molecular Cloud (GMC), a cloud complex located nearby Sgr A at the Galactic Center. Absorptions from HF, para-water and CH are detected over velocities ranging from about -185 km/s to +80 km/s. Our spectra exhibit a bi-modal distribution where the HF optical depth is larger than that of para-water by at least a factor of 2 for velocities greater than -80 km/s, as found for other Galactic sources. However, for velocities lower than -80 km/s, the HF optical depth is smaller than that of para-water by factors of 2 to 3. The implications of these differences are reviewed in this paper.
*Herschel is an ESA space observatory with science instruments provided by European-led Principal Investigator consortia and with important participation from NASA.

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