Paper submitted !

Just submitted my sixth paper as first author. I suppose it won't hurt to show the title and  abstract :

Attack of the Flying Snakes : Formation of Isolated HI Clouds By Fragmentation of Long Streams

The existence of long (> 100 kpc) HI streams and free-floating HI clouds (lacking a clear association with a parent galaxy) is well-known. While the formation of the streams has been investigated extensively, and the isolated clouds are often purported to be interaction debris, little research has been done on the formation of optically dark HI clouds that are not part of a larger stream. One possibility is that such features result from the fragmentation of their more extended parent streams, while another possibility idea is that they are primordial, optically dark galaxies. We test the validity of the fragmentation scenario (via harassment) using numerical simulations. To ensure that our results correspond to observations, we present catalogues (from literature searches) of both the known long HI streams (42 objects) and free-floating HI clouds suggested as dark galaxy candidates (51 objects). In particular, we investigate whether it is possible to form compact (< 20 kpc) features with high velocity widths (> 100 km/s), similar to observed clouds which are otherwise particularly intriguing dark galaxy candidates. We find that producing such features is possible but extremely unlikely, occurring no more than about 0.2% of the time in our simulations. In contrast, we find that genuine dark galaxies could be extremely stable to harassment and remain detectable even after 5 Gyr in the cluster environment. We also discuss the possibility that such objects could be the progenitors of recently discovered ultra diffuse galaxies.

Now I have to figure out what the heck to do next...