Quantifying the Interstellar Medium and Cosmic Rays in the MBM 53, 54, and 55 Molecular Clouds and the Pegasus Loop using Fermi-LAT Gamma-ray Observations

TL;DR

This study uses Fermi-LAT gamma-ray data to analyze the interstellar medium and cosmic rays in specific molecular clouds and a loop structure, revealing the limitations of dust emission proxies and quantifying unseen gas mass.

Contribution

It introduces a method to estimate total gas mass using gamma-ray data and dust temperature, highlighting the presence of significant untraced gas and comparing gamma-ray emissivities with cosmic ray models.

Findings

Untraced gas mass is about 25% of HI mass in optically thin regions.

Gamma-ray emissivity aligns with local cosmic ray spectra, within 15-20% of previous estimates.

Dust emission proxies are affected by dust temperature, impacting gas mass estimates.

Abstract

A study of the interstellar medium (ISM) and cosmic rays (CRs) using Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) data, in a region encompassing the nearby molecular clouds MBM 53, 54, and 55 and a far-infrared loop-like structure in Pegasus, is reported. By comparing Planck dust thermal emission model with Fermi-LAT gamma-ray data, it was found that neither the dust radiance (R) nor the dust opacity at 353 GHz (tau353) were proportional to the total gas column density N(Htot) primarily because N(Htot)/R and N(Htot)/tau353 depend on the dust temperature (Td). The N(Htot) distribution was evaluated using gamma-ray data by assuming the regions of high Td} to be dominated by optically thin atomic hydrogen (HI) and by employing an empirical linear relation of N(Htot)/R to Td. It was determined that the mass of the gas not traced by the 21-cm or 2.6-mm surveys is ~25% of the mass of HI in the optically thin case and is larger than the mass of the molecular gas traced by carbon monoxide by a factor of up to 5. The measured gamma-ray emissivity spectrum is consistent with a model based on CR spectra measured at the Earth and the nuclear enhancement factor of <=1.5. It is, however, lower than local HI emissivities reported by previous Fermi-LAT studies employing different analysis methods and assumptions on ISM properties by 15%-20% in energies below a few GeV, even if we take account of the statistical and systematic uncertainties. The origin of the discrepancy is also discussed.