Gamma-ray observations of the orion molecular clouds with the fermi large area telescope

We report on the gamma-ray observations of giant molecular clouds Orion A and B with the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on board the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The gamma-ray emission in the energy band between 100MeV and 100GeV is predicted to trace the gas mass distribution in the clouds through nuclear interactions between the Galactic cosmic rays (CRs) and interstellar gas. The gamma-ray production cross-section for the nuclear interaction is known to 10% precision which makes the LAT a powerful tool to measure the gas mass column density distribution of molecular clouds for a known CR intensity. We present here such distributions for Orion A and B, and correlate them with those of the velocity-integrated CO intensity (W _CO) at a 1° × 1°pixel level. The correlation is found to be linear over a W _CO range of ∼10-fold when divided in three regions, suggesting penetration of nuclear CRs to most of the cloud volumes. The W _CO-to-mass conversion factor, X _CO, is found to be ∼2.3 × 10²⁰ cm^-2(K km s^-1)^-1 for the high-longitude part of Orion A (l > ∼212°), 1.7times higher than ∼1.3 × 10 ²⁰ found for the rest of Orion A and B. We interpret the apparent high X _CO in the high-longitude region of Orion A in the light of recent works proposing a nonlinear relation between H₂ and CO densities in the diffuse molecular gas. W _CO decreases faster than the H₂ column density in the region making the gas "darker" to W _CO.