They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars––Robert Frost (‘Desert Places’)
Abstract
The interstellar gas in galaxies is heated by stellar radiation and cosmic rays and it also cools through radiation. We take a detailed look at these processes in order to understand the thermal state of equilibrium of the interstellar gas. This gas also manifests itself in different ‘phases’–molecular, neutral atomic and ionized, each with its characteristic temperature and density, which we attempt to understand.
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Bruce T Drain. Physics of the interstellar and intergalactic medium, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, USA, 2011.
Ronald J Reynolds, The gas between the stars, Scientific American, January 2002.
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Biman Nath is an astrophysicist at the Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru.
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Nath, B. Gas between the stars. Reson 21, 985–996 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-016-0409-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-016-0409-2