H2 distribution during formation of multiphase molecular clouds

Abstract

H2 is the simplest and the most abundant molecule in the ISM, and its formation precedes the formation of other molecules. Understanding the dynamical influence of the environment and the interplay between the thermal processes related to the formation and destruction of H2 and the structure of the cloud is mandatory to understand correctly the observations of H2. We perform high resolution MHD colliding flow simulations with the AMR code RAMSES in which the physics of H2 has been included. We compare the simulation results with various observations including the column densities of excited rotational levels. Due to a combination of thermal pressure, ram pressure and gravity, the clouds produced at the converging point of HI streams are highly inhomogeneous. H2 molecules quickly form in relatively dense clumps and spread into the diffuse interclump gas. This in particular leads to the existence of significant abundances of H2 in the diffuse and warm gas that lies in between clumps. Simulations and observations show similar trends, specially for the HI-to-H2 transition. The abundances of excited rotational levels, calculated at equilibrium in the simulations are very similar to the observed abundances inferred from FUSE results. This is a direct consequence of the presence of the H2 enriched diffuse and warm gas. Our simulations show that H2 rapidly forms in the dense clumps and, due to the complex structure of molecular clouds, quickly spreads at lower densities. Consequently a significant fraction of warm H2 exists in the low density gas. This warm H2 leads to column densities of excited rotational levels close to the observed ones likely revealing the complex intermix between the warm and the cold gas in molecular clouds. This suggests that the 2-phase structure of molecular clouds is an essential ingredient to fully understand molecular hydrogen in these objects.