Colloq Abstract - Salas
April 28, 2023
11:00am Mountain
Pedro Salas (GBO)
The Interstellar medium through a carbon filter
Abstract
The existence of giant Rydberg atoms in space was a remarkable discovery made nearly 60 years ago. Today, thanks to the continuous improvements in observational capabilities; higher sensitivities, larger instantaneous bandwidths, and improved spatial resolution, observations of spectral lines from these atoms can be made routinely, and their use as probes of the interstellar medium has even been extended to sources at high redshifts. In this talk, I will highlight some of the scientific questions that can be addressed by observations of spectral lines from large Rydberg atoms, such as probing the role of diffuse gas in the life cycle of molecular clouds and measuring the impact of stellar feedback on neutral gas. I will then present the Green Bank Telescope Diffuse Ionized Gas Survey at Low-frequencies (GDIGS-Low), a fully sampled multi-frequency survey of radio recombination lines in our Galaxy. In particular, I will present results from a pilot survey of the Cygnus-X region, where we are probing the gas layers where carbon is ionized and hydrogen is molecular. Finally, I will describe the exciting prospects for the future, especially what we can expect as new facilities come online.
