Abstract
IT is the purpose of this letter first to point out that several independent lines of evidence seem to indicate that the ‘intercloud medium’ does not exist in its usually quoted state with density ≳ 0.1 cm−3 and temperature T ∼ 104 K. Rather, a hot, tenuous medium (n ≲ 10−2 cm−3, T ∼ 106 K) seems more consistent with observations in the neighbourhood of the Sun. That such might be the situation has been previously suggested (see refs 1 and 2). A mechanism for producing such a medium has been proposed by Cox and Smith3. Second, this letter points out several implications of such a “missing intercloud medium” on the large-scale structure of spiral galaxies.
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SCOTT, J., JENSEN, E. & ROBERTS, W. The missing intercloud medium and spiral galaxies. Nature 265, 123–124 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1038/265123a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/265123a0
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