Halo Hydrogen

Postdoc David French is leading a survey using FUSE data to study the Galactic halo in absorption in high-order Lyman series lines. His project is using almost 50 lines of sight to luminous background galaxies spread across the sky to look at the spatial distribution of the gas across the sky. In this way we can form a metal-independent view of the diffuse baryons in the Galactic Halo, and determine the column density distribution function (CDDF) down to low H I column density.