The DOI matches its Crossref record; 40 of the 40 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
THE DARK MOLECULAR GAS
Open accessAbstract
The mass of molecular gas in an interstellar cloud is often measured using line emission from low rotational levels of CO, which are sensitive to the CO mass, and then scaling to the assumed molecular hydrogen H 2 mass. However, a significant H 2 mass may lie outside the CO region, in the outer regions of the molecular cloud where the gas-phase carbon resides in C or C + . Here, H 2 self-shields or is shielded by dust from UV photodissociation, whereas CO is photodissociated. This H 2 gas is "dark" in molecular transitions because of the absence of CO and other trace molecules, and because H 2 emits so weakly at temperatures 10 K < T < 100 K typical of this molecular component. This component has been indirectly observed through other tracers of mass such as gamma rays produced in cosmic-ray collisions with the gas and far-infrared/submillimeter wavelength dust continuum radiation. In this paper, we theoretically model this dark mass and find that the fraction of the molecular mass in this dark component is remarkably constant (∼0.3 for average visual extinction through the cloud ) and insensitive to the incident ultraviolet radiation field strength, the internal density distribution, and the mass of the molecular cloud as long as , or equivalently, the product of the average hydrogen nucleus column and the metallicity through the cloud, is constant. We also find that the dark mass fraction increases with decreasing , since relatively more molecular H 2 material lies outside the CO region in this case.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Weingartner, J. C., & Draine, B. T. (2001) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.1086/318651 · Cited by 2,599
Turbulence and star formation in molecular clouds
Larson, R. B. (1981) · Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society · doi:10.1093/mnras/194.4.809 · Cited by 2,592
A survey of interstellar H I from L-alpha absorption measurements. II
Bohlin, R. C., Savage, B. D., & Drake, J. F. (1978) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.1086/156357 · Cited by 2,540
McKee, C. F., & Ostriker, E. C. (2007) · Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics · doi:10.1146/annurev.astro.45.051806.110602 · Cited by 2,478
Self-citationThe Milky Way in Molecular Clouds: A New Complete CO Survey
Dame, T. M., Hartmann, D., & Thaddeus, P. (2001) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.1086/318388 · Cited by 2,115
Mass, luminosity, and line width relations of Galactic molecular clouds
Solomon, P. M., Rivolo, A. R., Barrett, J., & Yahil, A. (1987) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.1086/165493 · Cited by 1,611
Photoelectric heating of interstellar gas
Draine, B. T. (1978) · The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series · doi:10.1086/190513 · Cited by 1,342
Photodissociation regions. I - Basic model. II - A model for the Orion photodissociation region
Tielens, A. G. G. M., & Hollenbach, D. (1985) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.1086/163111 · Cited by 1,256
Self-citationNeutral Atomic Phases of the Interstellar Medium in the Galaxy
Wolfire, M. G., McKee, C. F., Hollenbach, D., & Tielens, A. G. G. M. (2003) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.1086/368016 · Cited by 1,125
Self-citationThe photodissociation and chemistry of interstellar CO
van Dishoeck, E. F., & Black, J. H. (1988) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.1086/166877 · Cited by 943
Cited by
Star Formation in the Milky Way and Nearby Galaxies
Kennicutt, R. C., & Evans, N. J. (2012) · Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics · doi:10.1146/annurev-astro-081811-125610 · Cited by 2,902
“The dark gas appears around AV = 0.4 mag, and is presumably the CO-poor, but H2-containing, outer parts of clouds (e.g., Wolfire et al. 2010), which can be seen in [CII] emission at 158 µm and in fluorescent H2 emission at 2 µm (e.g., Pak et al. 1998).”
BackgroundInfluentialDusty star-forming galaxies at high redshift
Casey, C. M., Narayanan, D., & Cooray, A. (2014) · Physics Reports · doi:10.1016/j.physrep.2014.02.009 · Cited by 800
A MOLECULAR STAR FORMATION LAW IN THE ATOMIC-GAS-DOMINATED REGIME IN NEARBY GALAXIES
Schruba, A., Leroy, A. K., Walter, F., Bigiel, F., Brinks, E., de Blok, W. J. G., Dumas, G., Kramer, C., Rosolowsky, E., Sandstrom, K., et al. (2011) · The Astronomical Journal · doi:10.1088/0004-6256/142/2/37 · Cited by 552
Narayanan, D., Krumholz, M. R., Ostriker, E. C., & Hernquist, L. (2012) · Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2012.20536.x · Cited by 383
The Nine Lives of Cosmic Rays in Galaxies
Grenier, I. A., Black, J. H., & Strong, A. W. (2015) · Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics · doi:10.1146/annurev-astro-082214-122457 · Cited by 320
Metadata
- Authors
- Wolfire, M. G., Hollenbach, D., & McKee, C. F.
- Venue
- The Astrophysical Journal
- Publisher
- American Astronomical Society
- Published
- 2010-05-27
- Volume
- 716
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 1191-1207
- ISSN
- 0004-637X (ISSN-L)
- 1538-4357
- OpenAlex
- W2069524830
- Cited by
- 717
- References
- 40
- FWCI
- 22.98
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: THE DARK MOLECULAR GAS. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1088/0004-637x/716/2/1191
- The paper
- Wolfire, M. G., Hollenbach, D., & McKee, C. F. (2010). THE DARK MOLECULAR GAS. The Astrophysical Journal. https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637x/716/2/1191
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
