Book Description

It has been revealed by observational evidences from various experiments at the beginning of the 20th century that the Earth is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays, high-energy particles of extraterrestrial origin. Since these particles are very energetic, it is believed that they could penetrate deep into molecular clouds and ionize the densest parts of these objects where new stars are born. This means that cosmic rays regulate the level of ionization that controls not only the chemistry of molecular clouds but also the coupling between the gas and the magnetic field which support the cloud against gravity during the process of star formation. Interestingly, the ionization rates inferred from infrared and radio observations are much larger than the commonly quoted value in the literature. This calls for a reassessment from a theoretical point of view of the ionization rate in clouds. This task requires a better understanding of the transport of cosmic rays into clouds and, more importantly, the knowledge of the amount of low energy cosmic rays at different positions in our Galaxy. The former has been investigated in some of the pioneering papers in the seventies and eighties but there might be room for some improvements. The latter is known not too long ago at least for the local interstellar medium thanks to the data from the Voyager probes. It is, however, not very clear whether or not these data could be considered as reference values for the density of low energy cosmic rays in the entire Galaxy. The aim of this work is, therefore, to study the propagation of low energy cosmic rays in neutral environments and also to better interpret the observational data of the ionization rate in both isolated molecular clouds and the ones in the vicinity of cosmic accelerators like supernova remnants.