Striated Cold Neutral HI Clouds: Precursors to Filamentary Molecular Clouds questionMark

One of the early discoveries made with Herschel is the fascinating omnipresence of filamentary structures in all Galactic molecular clouds and the intimate relationship between these filaments and the star formation process. The physical origin of the dusty filaments imaged with Herschel remains an open issue, however. One likely possibility is that they originate from primordial structures in the diffuse, cold neutral (atomic) medium. We propose to use Herschel in parallel mode to image a unique region of the sky, centered on the RiegelCrutcher clouds, where hairlike striations have been detected in HI absorption. These HI striations are aligned with the local magnetic field and parallel to faint dust filaments seen in Herschel Gould Belt Survey images of the adjacent Pipe molecular cloud. SPIRE has the sensitivity to detect the dust continuum emission from thesefaint HI striations (Av virgul 0.5), which will allow us to establish, for the first time, a direct connection between the filamentary texture of the cold atomic medium and that of starforming molecular clouds. truncated!, Please see actual data for full text [truncated!, Please see actual data for full text]