Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Continuum And Spectral Line Radiation From A Random Clumpy Medium, John E. Conway, Moshe Elitzur, Rodrigo Para

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications

We present a formalism for continuum and line emission from random clumpy media together with its application to problems of current interest, including CO spectral lines from ensembles of clouds and radio emission from H ii regions, supernovae, and star-forming regions. For line emission, we find that the effects of clump opacity on observed line ratios can be indistinguishable from variations of intrinsic line strengths, adding to the difficulties in determining abundances from line observations. Our formalism is applicable to arbitrary distributions of cloud properties, provided the cloud volume filling factor is small; numerical simulations show it to hold up …