English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT
Add to Basket
  Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released
Journal Article

Rigorous theory for secondary cosmic-ray ionization

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons4670

Ivlev,  Alexej V.
Center for Astrochemical Studies at MPE, MPI for Extraterrestrial Physics, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons228026

Silsbee,  Kedron
Center for Astrochemical Studies at MPE, MPI for Extraterrestrial Physics, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)
There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe
Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Ivlev, A. V., Silsbee, K., Padovani, M., & Galli, D. (2021). Rigorous theory for secondary cosmic-ray ionization. The Astrophysical Journal, 909(2): 107. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/abdc27.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0008-5457-8
Abstract
The energy spectrum of electrons produced in molecular gas by interstellar cosmic rays (CRs) is rigorously calculated as a function of gas column density N traversed by the CRs. This allows us to accurately compute the local value of the secondary ionization rate of molecular hydrogen, ζsec(N), as a function of the local primary ionization rate, ζp(N). The ratio ζsec/ζp increases monotonically with N, and can considerably exceed the value of ≈0.67 commonly adopted in the literature. For sufficiently soft interstellar spectra, the dependence ζsec/ζp versus N is practically insensitive to their particular shape and thus is a general characteristic of the secondary CR ionization in dense gas.