Multiphase turbulent interstellar medium: some recent results from radio astronomy

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent radio astronomical observations of the interstellar medium at 1.4 GHz, highlighting turbulence, multiphase structure, and challenging existing thermal models with new empirical evidence.

Contribution

It synthesizes recent observational results and discusses their implications for understanding turbulence and the multiphase nature of the interstellar medium, questioning standard thermal models.

Findings

Power-law spectra of density and velocity fluctuations consistent with Kolmogorov turbulence.

Detection of significant intermediate-temperature gas challenges the standard two-phase model.

Numerical simulations incorporating turbulence can explain some observational results.

Abstract

The radio frequency 1.4 GHz transition of the atomic hydrogen is one of the important tracers of the diffuse neutral interstellar medium. Radio astronomical observations of this transition, using either a single dish telescope or an array interferometer, reveal different properties of the interstellar medium. Such observations are particularly useful to study the multiphase nature and turbulence in the interstellar gas. Observations with multiple radio telescopes have recently been used to study these two closely related aspects in greater detail. Using various observational techniques, the density and the velocity fluctuations in the Galactic interstellar medium was found to have a Kolmogorov-like power law power spectra. The observed power law scaling of the turbulent velocity dispersion with the length scale can be used to derive the true temperature distribution of the medium. Observations from a large ongoing atomic hydrogen absorption line survey have also been used to study the distribution of gas at different temperature. The thermal steady state model predicts that the multiphase neutral gas will exist in cold and warm phase with temperature below 200 K and above 5000 K respectively. However, these observations clearly show the presence of a large fraction of gas in the intermediate unstable phase. These results raise serious doubt about the validity of the standard model, and highlight the necessity of alternative theoretical models. Interestingly, numerical simulations suggest that some of the observational results can be explained consistently by including the effects of turbulence in the models of the multiphase medium. This review article presents a brief outline of some of the basic ideas of radio astronomical observations and data analysis, summarizes the results from recent observations, and discusses possible implications of the results.