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Spectroscopic observations play essential roles in astrophysics. They are crucial for determining physical parameters in our Universe, providing information about the chemistry of various astronomical environments. The proper execution of the spectroscopic analysis requires accounting for all the physical effects that are compatible to the signal-to-noise ratio. We find in this paper the influence on spectroscopy from the atomic/ground state alignment owing to anisotropic radiation and modulated by interstellar magnetic field, has significant impact on the study of interstellar gas. In different observational scenarios, we comprehensively demonstrate how atomic alignment influences the spectral analysis and provide the expressions for correcting the effect. The variations are even more pronounced for multiplets and line ratios. We show the variation of the deduced physical parameters caused by the atomic alignment effect, including alpha-to-iron ratio ([X/Fe]) and ionization fraction. Synthetic observations are performed to illustrate the visibility of such effect with current facilities. A study of Photodissociation regions in rho Ophiuchi cloud is presented to demonstrate how to account for atomic alignment in practice. Our work has shown that due to its potential impact, atomic alignment has to be included in an accurate spectroscopic analysis of the interstellar gas with current observational capability.
Theoretical studies have revealed that dust grains are usually moving fast through the turbulent interstellar gas, which could have significant effects upon interstellar chemistry by modifying grain accretion. This effect is investigated in this work on the basis of numerical gas-grain chemical modelling. Major features of the grain motion effect in the typical environment of dark clouds (DC) can be summarized as follows: (1) decrease of gas-phase (both neutral and ionic) abundances and increase of surface abundances by up to 2-3 orders of magnitude; (2) shifts of the existing chemical jumps to earlier evolution ages for gas-phase species and to later ages for surface species by factors of about 10; (3) a few exceptional cases in which some species turn out to be insensitive to this effect and some other species can show opposite behaviours too. These effects usually begin to emerge from a typical DC model age of about 10(5) yr. The grain motion in a typical cold neutral medium (CNM) can help overcome the Coulomb repulsive barrier to enable effective accretion of cations on to positively charged grains. As a result, the grain motion greatly enhances the abundances of some gas-phase and surface species by factors up to 2-6 or more orders of magnitude in the CNM model. The grain motion effect in a typical molecular cloud (MC) is intermediate between that of the DC and CNM models, but with weaker strength. The grain motion is found to be important to consider in chemical simulations of typical interstellar medium.