Related papers: Confirmation of circumstellar phosphine
In 2001, the discovery of circumstellar water vapour around the ageing carbon star IRC+10216 was announced. This detection challenged the current understanding of chemistry in old stars, since water vapour was predicted to be absent in…
We published spectra of phosphine molecules in Venus' clouds, following open-science principles in releasing data and scripts (with community input leading to ALMA re-processing, now benefiting multiple projects). Some misconceptions about…
Context. LS I +61 303 is a member of the select group of gamma-ray binaries: galactic binary systems that contain a massive star and a compact object, show a changing milliarcsecond morphology and a similar broad spectral energy…
The first detection of the molecular ion H3+ in an extragalactic object has been made toward the highly obscured ultraluminous galaxy, IRAS 08572+3915. Two absorption features near 3.9 microns in its spectrum are identified as the…
As a galaxy evolves, its chemical composition changes and the abundance ratios of different elements are powerful probes of the underlying evolutionary processes. Phosphorous is an element whose evolution has remained quite elusive until…
We report a search for the diatomic hydrides SiH, PH, and FeH along the line of sight toward the chemically rich circumstellar envelopes of IRC+10216 and VY Canis Majoris. These molecules are thought to form in high temperature regions near…
Molecular emission is observed in a wide variety of astrophysical environments, yet a substantial fraction of spectral features detected at mm wavelengths remains unidentified. Identifying these features is essential for constraining the…
The rotational spectrum of silyl isocyanide (SiH$_3$NC), an isomer of the well studied silyl cyanide (SiH$_3$CN), has been detected in the laboratory in a supersonic molecular beam, and the identification was confirmed by observations of…
Aims: The study at hand aims to describe the distribution of atomic carbon, C0, throughout the envelope, in support of an improved understanding of its photo-chemistry. Additionally, we also briefly discuss the observation of [CII] emission…
In this paper we study the oxygen chemistry in the C-rich circumstellar shells of IRC+10216. The recent discoveries of oxygen bearing species (water, hydroxyl radical and formaldehyde) toward this source challenge our current understanding…
Phosphorus is a necessary element for life on Earth, but at present we have limited constraints on its chemistry in star- and planet-forming regions: to date, phosphorus carriers have only been detected towards a few low-mass protostars.…
We synthesized the astrochemically relevant molecule 3-hydroxypropanal (HOCH$_2$CH$_2$CHO) and subsequently measured and analyzed its rotational spectrum in several frequency regions ranging from 130 to 485 GHz. We analyzed the ground…
Ethyl phosphaethyne, C2H5CP, has been characterized spectroscopically in the gas phase for the first time, employing millimeter- and submillimeter-wave spectroscopy in the frequency regime from 75 to 760 GHz. Spectroscopic detection and…
The atmospheres of low-temperature brown dwarfs and gas giant planets are expected to contain the phosphine molecule, PH$_3$ However, previous observations have shown much lower abundances of this molecule than predicted by atmospheric…
A new chemical model is presented for the carbon-rich circumstellar envelope of the AGB star IRC+10216. The model includes shells of matter with densities that are enhanced relative to the surrounding circumstellar medium. The chemical…
High spectral resolution mid-IR observations of ethylene (C2H4) towards the AGB star IRC+10216 were obtained using the Texas Echelon Cross Echelle Spectrograph (TEXES) at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF). Eighty ro-vibrational…
Using the Submillimeter Array we have detected the J=3-2 and 2-1 rotational transitions from within the first vibrationally excited state of CO toward the extreme carbon star IRC+10216 (CW Leo). The emission remains spatially unresolved…
Fullerenes are a particularly stable class of carbon molecules in the shape of a hollow sphere or ellipsoid that might be formed in the outflows of carbon stars. Once injected into the interstellar medium (ISM), these stable species survive…
Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) are widely accepted as the carriers of the Aromatic Infrared Bands (AIBs), but an unambiguous identification of any specific interstellar PAH is still missing. For polar PAHs, pure rotational…
We report the detection of H2CO (formaldehyde) around the carbon-rich AGB star, IRC+10216. We find a fractional abundance with respect to molecular hydrogen of x(H2CO)= (1.3 {+1.5}{-0.8}) x 10^{-8}. This corresponds to a formaldehyde…