Quotes

Quotes (because sometimes we rediscover the wheel...)

"The connection of nebulosities with vacancies, and the apparent mingling of the outer portion of the nebula with the darkness of the sky, as if that darkness were something really tangible, as suggested in the case of the nebula of rho Ophiuchi, is an extremely important feature, from which I believe there will some day develop fact of the greatest importance in explaining the real structure of the heavens"

“Among the most surprising things in connection with these nebula-filled holes are the vacant lanes that so frequently run from them for great distances. These lanes undoubtedly have had something to do with the formation of the holes and with the nebula in them.”

Barnard 1907, "On Nebulous Groundwork in the constellation Taurus"

"We should have a colloquium on the paper by Reber, would you like to study it? And, by the way, radio astronomy can really become very important if there were at least one spectral line in the radio spectrum."

Oort in conversation with Hulst, 1944

"The entire line profile contains information concerning the velocity field of the cloud. To obtain this information, the intensity distribution over the whole cloud must be examined, channel by channel rather than by assuming Gaussian line shapes and examining only peak intensities and equivalent widths."

Loren 1976, "Colliding clouds and star formation in NGC 1333"

"... he warned me against getting too deeply involved with dark nebulae and their problems. He indicated to me that it would have been wiser if I had avoided the dark nebulae. He suggested that it might have been better to concentrate on the regions in between dark clouds where one can explore the fine structure of our Galaxy more directly than in regions in which one is bothered by obscuring nebulosity. I hope to show you tonight that it has proved very useful to have paid attention to the dark nebulae, which have a very special place of their own in the study of our home galaxy, the Milky Way System."

Bok 1977, "Dark Nebulae, Globules, and Prostostars"

"... we suspect that higher spatial and spectral resolution and improved signal-to-noise ratios may reveal the presence of multiple components, which could be identified with multiple fragments, some of which may produce optically thick 13CO lines."

“... The results suggest that the condensation process occurs in a hierarchical fashion and that the largest fragments are more or less equally spaced along the length of the filament, with a characteristic separation equal to 3±1 times there mean diameter.”

“We propose that such filaments are in fact swept up by external pressure and that they condense into globules by their own self-gravity”

Schneider & Elmegreen 1979, "A catalog of dark globular filaments"

"In order to minimize effects of line saturation, which make it difficult or impossible to obtain a true velocity dispersion from the linewidths (Phillips et al 1979), optically thick lines have been avoided wherever possible and used only in few cases where large-scale variations across the cloud provide the dominant contribution to the cloud velocity dispersion."

Larson 1981, "Turbulence and star formation in molecular clouds"