We have searched three hot molecular cores for submillimeter emission from the nucleic acid building-block pyrimidine. We obtain upper limits to the total pyrimidine (beam-averaged) column densities towards Sgr B2(N), Orion KL and W51 e1/e2 of 1.7E+14 cm^{-2}, 2.4E+14 cm^{-2} and 3.4E+14 cm^{-2}, respectively. The associated upper limits to the pyrimidine fractional abundances lie in the range (0.3-3)E-10. Implications of this result for interstellar organic chemistry, and for the prospects of detecting nitrogen heterocycles in general, are briefly discussed.
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0308116,
title = {A Search for Interstellar Pyrimidine},
author = {Yi-Jehng Kuan and Chi-Hung Yan and Steven B. Charnley and Zbigniew Kisiel and Pascale Ehrenfreund and Hui-Chun Huang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0308116},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
8 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS