Excitation of H2 and HD in Shocks and PDRs

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Abstract
Photodissociation regions (PDRs) and shocks give rise to conspicuous emission from rotationally and vibrationally excited molecular hydrogen. This line emission has now been studied with ISO and from the ground in great detail. A remarkable discovery has been that toward the Orion outflow and other shock-excited regions, the H2 level populations show a very high excitation component. We suggest that these high-excitation populations may arise from non-thermal pumping processes, such as H2 formation and high-velocity ion-molecule collision in partially dissociative shocks. In PDRs such as NGC 7023 however, formation pumping is always less important than fluorescent pumping.We furthermore present two HD emission line detections toward Orion Peak 1. This enables the first comparison of the H2 and the HD excitation, which surprisingly turn out to be identical.

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