Related papers: Organic Matter in Space - an Overview
Observations of comets and asteroids show that the Solar Nebula that spawned our planetary system was rich in water and organic molecules. Bombardment brought these organics to the young Earth's surface, seeding its early chemistry. Unlike…
(Abridged) Protoplanetary disks are vital objects in star and planet formation, possessing all the material which may form a planetary system orbiting the new star. We investigate the synthesis of complex organic molecules (COMs) in disks…
Main sequence stars, like the Sun, are often found to be orbited by circumstellar material that can be categorized into two groups, planets and debris. The latter is made up of asteroids and comets, as well as the dust and gas derived from…
This paper presents a review of ideas that interconnect Astrochemistry and Galactic Dynamics. Since these two areas are vast and not recent, each one has already been covered separately by several reviews. After a general historical…
(Abridged) The birth environment of the Sun will have influenced the conditions in the pre-solar nebula, including the attainable chemical complexity, important for prebiotic chemistry. The formation and distribution of complex organic…
'Debris disks' are collections of small bodies around stars, such as the Asteroid Belt and Kuiper Belt in our Solar System. These disks are composed of objects smaller than planets, including asteroids, comets, dust, and dwarf planets. We…
Partially ionized plasmas are found across the Universe in many different astrophysical environments. They constitute an essential ingredient of the solar atmosphere, molecular clouds, planetary ionospheres and protoplanetary disks, among…
Chemical abundances provide important clues to the evolution of galaxies. Ionized nebulae are one of the main sources of chemical abundance measurements, especially in external galaxies. Studies of H II regions have shown that the overall…
Circumstellar debris disks are the extrasolar analogues of the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt. They consist of comets and leftover planetesimals that continuously collide and produce circumstellar dust that can be observed as infrared…
A novel mechanism of the formation of compact dusty clouds in astrophysical environments is discussed. It is shown that the balance of collective forces operating in space dusty plasmas can result in the effect of dust self-confinement,…
In this paper we review recent progress in our understanding of the chemical evolution of protoplanetary disks. Current observational constraints and theoretical modeling on the chemical composition of gas and dust in these systems are…
If strange quark matter is stable in small lumps, we expect to find such lumps, called ``strangelets'', on Earth due to a steady flux in cosmic rays. Following recent astrophysical models, we predict the strangelet flux at the top of the…
In this chapter we review the astrophysical origins of Earth's carbon, starting from the products of the Big Bang and culminating with the Earth's formation. We review the measured compositions of different primitive objects including…
We review the properties of dust in protoplanetary disks around optically visible pre-main sequence stars obtained with a variety of observational techniques, from measurements of scattered light at visual and infrared wavelengths to…
In recent years, evidence has been obtained that in the outer region of the Solar System (in the inner part of the Oort cloud), at a distance $\sim300-700$ AU from the Sun, there may be a captured planet or a primordial black hole. In this…
Comets are a rich reservoir of complex organic molecules. Ground and space-based observatories have recently greatly enhanced the cometary molecular inventory. Although these molecules' origin is believed to be the cometary nucleus, they…
Asteroids and comets are remnants from the era of Solar System formation over 4.5 billion years ago, and therefore allow us to address two fundamental questions in astronomy: what was the nature of our protoplanetary disk, and how did the…
The compositions of planet-forming disks are set by a combination of material inherited from the interstellar medium and material reprocessed during disk formation and evolution. Indeed, comets and primitive meteorites exhibit…
Transient microstructure in the diffuse interstellar medium has been observed towards galactic and extragalactic sources for decades, usually in lines of atoms and ions, and, more recently, in molecular lines. Evidently, there is a…
It is observed that hypervelocity space dust, which is continuously bombarding the Earth, creates immense momentum flows in the atmosphere. Some of this fast space dust inevitably will interact with the atmospheric system, transferring…