The OSER project

Abstract

The OSER project (Optical Scintillation by Extraterrestrial Refractors) is proposed to search for scintillation of extragalactic sources through the galactic -- disk or halo -- transparent $H\_2$ clouds, the last unknown baryonic structures. This project should allow one to detect column density stochastic variations in cool Galactic molecular clouds of order of $\sim 3\times 10^{-5}g/c{\mathrm{m}}^2$ per $\sim 10000\mathrm{km}$ transverse distance.

6 pages, 9 figures, 1 table