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Abstract
The existence of dark molecular gas, signifying molecular gas in interstellar clouds that is difficult or impossible to detect by spectroscopic emission lines, makes mass determination of small, diffuse molecular clouds difficult. The current thinking is that more sensitive observations of CO(1-0), or OH at 18 cm, or CH at 9 cm, may detect most of the dark molecular gas. We use archival CH observations of the 3335 MHz lines in the high-latitude molecular cloud, MBM 40, to address this issue. By averaging several nearby positions from the original CH observations, we produce a new, more sensitive, CH data set to trace molecular hydrogen in its lowest density component. We found a significantly higher molecular mass for MBM 40 ([44 ± 22] Solar Masses; about a factor of 2 greater than previous work) which indicates that at least some of the dark molecular gas in this cloud is detectable with sensitive CH observations.