Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

the6thReplicant t1_it1c7rg wrote

Do they mean molecular cloud? I've never heard about atomic clouds. (Yes I know what atoms and molecules are. Molecular cloud has a specific meaning, and consequences, in astrophysics. :)

76

Timbosconsin t1_it1g5w9 wrote

They mean atomic hydrogen (HI) gas structure and call it a cloud despite its huge scale. The article shows the huge diffuse HI structure around a distant galaxy cluster.

64

TheGoldenHand t1_it280my wrote

That's the word the researcher uses in an interview. The article doesn't specifically say whether its an English quote or translation.

5

SN2010jl t1_it5ufv4 wrote

>we carried out deep mapping observations of the 21 cm H i emission over a region of around 30′ × 30′ centred on SQ. ... Here we report atomic hydrogen (H i) observations in the vicinity of SQ with a smoothed sensitivity of 1σ = 4.2 × 1016 cm−2 per channel.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05206-x I searched the original paper and they don't have any discussion regarding molecular hydrogen. It is also extremely hard to directly detect molecular hydrogen as far as I know.

1