Related papers: Episodic Explosions in Interstellar Ices
In the currently-accepted model for star formation out of the interstellar gas in galaxies, the basic construction material is assumed to be large clouds of atomic hydrogen (HI). These clouds are thought to form higher-density complexes of…
Context: Chemical models of dense cloud cores often utilize the so-called pseudo-time-dependent approximation, in which the physical conditions are held fixed and uniform as the chemistry occurs. In this approximation, the initial…
Methanol ice is embedded in interstellar ice mantles present in dense molecular clouds. We aim to measure the sputtering efficiencies starting from different ice mantles of varying compositions experimentally, in order to evaluate their…
Observations of gaseous complex organic molecules (COMs) in cold starless and prestellar cloud cores require efficient desorption of the COMs and their parent species from icy mantles on interstellar grains. With a simple astrochemical…
Context. In dense clouds, hydrogenation reactions on icy dust grains are key in the formation of molecules, like formaldehyde, methanol, and complex organic molecules (COMs). These species form through the sequential hydrogenation of CO…
We present results from high-resolution three-dimensional simulations of turbulent interstellar gas that self-consistently follow its coupled thermal, chemical and dynamical evolution, with a particular focus on the formation and…
Observational evidence from local star-forming regions mandates that star formation occurs shortly after, or even during, molecular cloud formation. Models of the formation of molecular clouds in large-scale converging flows have identified…
It appears that the majority of rapidly-, well-localized gamma-ray bursts with undetected, or dark, optical afterglows, or `dark bursts' for short, occur in clouds of size R > 10L_{49}^{1/2} pc and mass M > 3x10^5L_{49} M_{sun}, where L is…
AIM: We have recently developed a microscopic Monte Carlo approach to study surface chemistry on interstellar grains and the morphology of ice mantles. The method is designed to eliminate the problems inherent in the rate-equation formalism…
A large fraction of the gas in the Galaxy is cold, dense, and molecular. If all this gas collapsed under the influence of gravity and formed stars in a local free-fall time, the star formation rate in the Galaxy would exceed that observed…
Interstellar hydrides -- that is, molecules containing a single heavy element atom with one or more hydrogen atoms -- were among the first molecules detected outside the solar system. They lie at the root of interstellar chemistry, being…
Recent observations of the high-redshift universe have uncovered a significant number of active galactic nuclei, implying that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) would have to have been formed at much earlier times than expected. Direct…
We suggest that Bipolar H{\sc ii} Regions may be the aftermath of collisions between clouds. Such a collision will produce a shock-compressed layer, and a star cluster can then condense out of the dense gas near the centre of the layer. If…
My thesis work aims to study the inter-relation between various physical and chemical conditions in a wide range of astrophysical environments. Our studied regions range from the super-hot regions (i.e., nebular, photon-dominated, or…
Within the precise cosmological framework provided by the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter model and standard Big Bang nucleosynthesis, the chemical evolution of the pregalactic gas can now be followed with accuracy limited only by the uncertainties…
We describe a numerical implementation of star formation in disk galaxies, in which the conversion of cooling gas to stars in the multiphase interstellar medium is governed by the rate at which molecular clouds are formed and destroyed. In…
The late stages of stellar evolution from asymptotic giant branch stars to planetary nebulae are now known to be an active phase of molecular synthesis. Over 80 gas-phase molecules have been detected through rotational transitions in the…
Observations and simulations have demonstrated that star formation in galaxies must be actively suppressed to prevent the formation of over-massive galaxies. Galactic outflows driven by stellar feedback or supermassive black hole accretion…
Contemporary galactic star formation occurs predominantly within gravitationally unstable, cold, dense molecular gas within supersonic, turbulent, magnetized giant molecular clouds (GMCs). Significantly, because the chemical evolution…
Carbon containing molecules in cold molecular clouds show various levels of isotopic fractionation through multiple observations. To understand such effects, we have developed a new gas-grain chemical model with updated 13C fractionation…