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Gas Temperature Demography and the HI-to-H2 Transition in the Magellanic Clouds

Abstract:

Given their proximity and low metallicity, the Magellanic Clouds provide the ideal laboratory to study the evolution of gas in the interstellar medium. We present first results from a new HI and OH absorption line study using the ATCA to measure the warm-to-cold atomic fraction and the atomic-to-molecular transition in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC, respectively). The survey targets 48 sources in the LMC and 29 sources in the SMC, which covers more sources at higher senstitivity and spectral resolutin than previous absorption line measurement studies. We decompose the emission and absorption spectra using the autonomous gaussian decomposition software GaussPy (Lindner et al. 2015), which allows us to measure the spin temperature and optical depth of the HI gas. These measurements of the optical depth allow us to constrain the amount of" CO-faint" gas that is optically thick HI gas …