SIMBAD references

More than 20 years after the Copernicus satellite, ORFEUS allows the investigation of molecular hydrogen (H₂) in the diffuse interstellar medium by way of FUV absorption spectroscopy once again. This time, targets in the Magellanic Clouds were also observed, allowing the first investigation of cold H₂ in a metal-poor environment outside the Milky Way disk. This paper presents new H₂ measurements in LMC gas along the lines of sight toward HD 269698 (Sk-67166), HD 269546 (Sk-6882) and HD 36402 (Sk-67104) and summarizes the ORFEUS H₂ measurements in the the Magellanic Clouds. For seven lines of sight we investigate correlations between N(HI), N(H₂), E(B-V) and compare the results with H₂ observations in the Milky Way disk. We find that the abundance of H₂ is low in comparison to the total gas quantity and speculate that the fraction of hydrogen in molecular form is limited by the lower dust content of the Magellanic Clouds.