The Local Leo Cold Cloud and New Limits on a Local Hot Bubble
  We present a multi-wavelength study of the local Leo cold cloud (LLCC), a
very nearby, very cold cloud in the interstellar medium. Through stellar
absorption studies we find that the LLCC is between 11.3 pc and 24.3 pc away,
making it the closest known cold neutral medium cloud and well within the
boundaries of the local cavity. Observations of the cloud in the 21-cm HI line
reveal that the LLCC is very cold, with temperatures ranging from 15 K to 30 K,
and is best fit with a model composed of two colliding components. The cloud
has associated 100 micron thermal dust emission, pointing to a somewhat low
dust-to-gas ratio of 48 x 10^-22 MJy sr^-1 cm^2. We find that the LLCC is too
far away to be generated by the collision among the nearby complex of local
interstellar clouds, but that the small relative velocities indicate that the
LLCC is somehow related to these clouds. We use the LLCC to conduct a shadowing
experiment in 1/4 keV X-rays, allowing us to differentiate between different
possible origins for the observed soft X-ray background. We find that a local
hot bubble model alone cannot account for the low-latitude soft X-ray
background, but that isotropic emission from solar wind charge exchange does
reproduce our data. In a combined local hot bubble and solar wind charge
exchange scenario, we rule out emission from a local hot bubble with an 1/4 keV
emissivity greater than 1.1 Snowdens / pc at 3 sigma, 4 times lower than
previous estimates. This result dramatically changes our perspective on our
local interstellar medium.
