The  Astronomical Journal published a work about the dynamics and star  formation of high-latitude gas — Gemini Molecular Cloud — in July 24,  2015, which conducted by research team of Xu Ye, Purple Mountain  Observatory, Chinese Academy of Science. This work would be a good  starting of a large-scale survey towards high-latitude molecular gas  survey in the northern sky. 

    Although the study of high-latitude molecular gas was active in the  1980s and 1990s, relative to larger molecular gas surveys in Galactic  plane, very few similar systemic studies were towards high galactic  latitudes over the past several decades. Thus, relatively speaking, the  observation toward the high latitude gas just like develops a piece of  uncultivated land, especially for research in mm wavelength, which is a  best choice to study the formation of molecular gas and star in the  vicinity of our solar system. Moreover, the velocity structure of  high-latitude gas is very simple and seldom has multi-peak structure,  which is very contribute to study the dynamical structure of molecular  cores for very little obstruct. In addition, because relative isolation  among high-latitude gas, they are not so strongly interact with each  other like gas in galactic plane, which shows a best advantage to study  the formation of a single star.  

    Research worker of Purple Mountain Observatory asserted that the big  difference among core candidates may be triggered by stochastic  processes between clouds such as collisions and chaotic magnetic fields,  rather than ordered motions such as rotation according to channel map  of part of this cloud (Figure 1). And the analysis of line width  indicates that the non-thermal broadening mechanism plays a  dominant role in this cloud (Figure 2). As for star formation, the  relationship between virial mass and LTE mass imply that: core  candidates in this cloud are more likely unbound, and the power index  value of 0.97 that we obtained is larger than both the value for  gravitationally bound clumps and pressure-confined clumps, which may be a  unique property of high-latitude gas. All of those results are  contribute to light interest to high-latitude gas. 

 Figure 1. Longitude–velocity map in 12CO. 

    The first author of this work is LI Yingjie of Purple Mountain Observatory.  This  work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China  (grant Nos. 11133008 and 11233007), the Strategic Priority Research  Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (grant No. XDB 09010300), and  the Key Laboratory for Radio Astronomy. link of article: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-6256/150/2/60/pdf