We report on the gamma-ray observations of giant molecular clouds Orion A and B with the Large Area Telescope ( LAT ) on-board the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope .
The gamma-ray emission in the energy band between \sim 100 MeV and \sim 100 GeV is predicted to trace the gas mass distribution in the clouds through nuclear interactions between the Galactic cosmic rays ( CRs ) and interstellar gas .
The gamma-ray production cross-section for the nuclear interaction is known to \sim 10 % precision which makes the LAT a powerful tool to measure the gas mass column density distribution of molecular clouds for a known CR intensity .
We present here such distributions for Orion A and B , and correlate them with those of the velocity integrated CO intensity ( W _ { \mathrm { CO } } ) at a 1 \arcdeg \times 1 \arcdeg pixel level .
The correlation is found to be linear over a W _ { \mathrm { CO } } range of \sim 10 fold when divided in 3 regions , suggesting penetration of nuclear CRs to most of the cloud volumes .
The W _ { \mathrm { CO } } -to-mass conversion factor , X _ { \mathrm { CO } } , is found to be \sim 2.3 \times 10 ^ { 20 } \mbox { $ \mathrm { cm ^ { -2 } ( K km s ^ { -1 } ) ^ { -1 } } $ } for the high-longitude part of Orion A ( l > 212 \arcdeg ) , \sim 1.7 times higher than \sim 1.3 \times 10 ^ { 20 } found for the rest of Orion A and B .
We interpret the apparent high X _ { \mathrm { CO } } in the high-longitude region of Orion A in the light of recent works proposing a non-linear relation between \mathrm { H } _ { 2 } and CO densities in the diffuse molecular gas . W _ { \mathrm { CO } } decreases faster than the \mathrm { H } _ { 2 } column density in the region making the gas “ darker ” to W _ { \mathrm { CO } } .