Modeling the Cirrus Clouds

Abstract:

The cirrus clouds are mainly diffuse or translucent clouds, with typically
a very low visual extinction. But such clouds may have dense molecular cores.
These cores could be precursors to star formation and are very good candidates
to study early phases of stellar evolution. Despite of the apparent simplicity of
these regions, the observations of the dense gas tracers contradict with the
models and hence suggesting a gap in our understanding of these regions.
Polaris Flare is a high latitude cirrus cloud, with several star-less cores. A
translucent molecular cloud MCLD 123.5+24.9 is one of the denser regions of
the Polaris cirrus complex, located in the direction near the celestial North Pole.
I am going to discuss the models of this region using Cloudy with the help of
CO transition line observations and recent Herschel observations from the
continuum dust emission.