EURD observations of interstellar radiation

The hot interstellar medium (ISM) has far-reaching effect upon thestructure of galaxies. Although ISM heating processes are fairly wellunderstood, after decades of study, the processes that cool the hotinterstellar medium remain obscure. The EURD spectrograph was designed tomeasure the diffuse cosmic background from 350 to 1100 A in order tostudy the hot ISM and the mechanisms by which it sheds its energy. Wepresent the first analysis of EURD observations of the cosmic background.These EURD observations have proven to be far more sensitive than previouswork; compared to previous results, we have improved the limits to theintensity of 450 to 900 A line emission from the ISM by one to twoorders of magnitude. Our limit to OVI 1032 A / 1038 A doublet of 7900ph s-1 cm-2 str-1 is the lowest yet reported. The EURDlimits to line emission are less intense than predicted by a varietytheoretical models of the local ISM.