Continued Investigation of Low Intensity Emission Lines from the Interstellar Medium

雷诺兹博士将继续研究星际介质中热电离气体的性质和来源。这种气体是新发现的介质中的一种主要成分，人们对它知之甚少。要准确理解星际物质和过程，需要对这种电离成分进行彻底的研究，就像对介质的其他主要成分一样。这项工作将集中在观察电离区的结构和运动学，电离区和银河系高纬度中性氢区之间的关系，以及气体中的电离条件。这些观测将使用威斯康星大学的大口径法布里-珀罗光谱仪进行，该光谱仪使探测和研究这种气体发出的微弱光谱线成为可能，并因此成为关于星际介质最后一个主要成分的性质的主要信息来源。该仪器的发展将大大提高观测能力，并有助于进一步开拓星际介质天文学的这一新领域。

Dr. Reynolds will continue his investigation into the nature and origin of warm ionized gas in the interstellar medium. This gas is a major, newly identified component of the medium about which very little is known. An accurate understanding of interstellar matter and processes is going to require as thorough an investigation of this ionized component as of the other principal components of the medium. The work will concentrate on observations of the structure and kinematics of the ionized regions, the relationship between the regions of ionized gas and regions of neutral hydrogen at high Galactic latitude, and the ionization conditions within the gas. The observations will be carried out with the large aperture Fabry-Perot spectrometer at the University of Wisconsin, which has made possible the detection and study of the faint optical line emission from this gas, and which as a result has become the primary source of information about the properties of this last major component of the interstellar medium. Developments in the instrumentation will provide significant improvements in the observational capabilities and will help to open up further this new area of interstellar medium astronomy.