Related papers: Methanol Along the Path from Envelope to Protoplan…
Ethanol (CH3CH2OH) has been detected in interstellar ices within regions associated with the early stages of star and planet formation. Its solid-phase pathways can lead to diverse conditions that can significantly influence its…
Recently, methanol was identified as a sensitive target system to probe variations of the proton-to-electron mass ratio $\mu$ [Jansen \emph{et al.} Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{106}, 100801 (2011)]. The high sensitivity of methanol originates…
Methanol (CH$_{3}$OH) is a key complex organic molecule (COM) in the interstellar medium, widely used as a tracer of dense gas and hot molecular cores (HMCs). Using high-resolution ALMA observations from the ATOMS survey, we investigate the…
Methanol maser emission has proven to be an excellent signpost of regions undergoing massive star formation (MSF). To investigate their role as an evolutionary tracer, we have recently completed a large observing program with the ATCA to…
An outstanding question of astrobiology is the link between the chemical composition of planets, comets, and other solar system bodies and the molecules formed in the interstellar medium. Understanding the chemical and physical evolution of…
(Abridged) Aims & Methods. A two-dimensional, semi-analytical model is presented that follows, for the first time, the chemical evolution from a collapsing molecular cloud (a pre-stellar core) to a protostar and circumstellar disk. The…
The composition of a protoplanetary disk is set by a combination of interstellar inheritance and gas and grain surface chemical reactions within the disk. The survival of inherited molecules, as well as the disk in situ chemistry depends on…
(abridged) The nature of early Class 0/I protostellar discs is not clearly understood. Early protostellar discs are needed to drive molecular outflows and jets observed in star forming regions, but there has been some debate to how they…
The methanol molecule is a sensitive probe of astrochemistry, astrophysics, and fundamental physics. The first-principles elucidation and prediction of its rotation-torsional-vibrational motions are enabled in this work by the computation…
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…
Context : Despite the low cosmic abundance of deuterium (D/H ~ 1e-5), large degrees of deuterium fractionation in molecules are observed in star forming regions with enhancements that can reach 13 orders of magnitude, which current models…
We study the evolution of Milky Way thick and thin discs in the light of the most recent observational data. In particular, we analyze abundance gradients of O, N, Fe and Mg along the thin disc as well as the [Mg/Fe] vs. [Fe/H] relations…
Despite the harsh conditions of the interstellar medium, chemistry thrives in it, especially in star forming regions where several interstellar complex organic molecules (iCOMs) have been detected. Yet, how these species are synthesised is…
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…
Two main formation routes have been proposed for interstellar complex organic molecules (iCOMs): on dust grain surfaces and in the gas phase. Observing such molecules in protostellar outflow shock regions - provided that their ages are…
Context. The spatial distribution of molecules around starless cores is a powerful tool for studying the physics and chemistry governing the earliest stages of star formation. Aims. Our aim is to study the chemical differentiation in…
We show that in many methanol maser sources the masers are located in lines, with a velocity gradient along them which suggests that the masers are situated in edge-on circumstellar, or protoplanetary, disks. We present VLBI observations of…
Deuterium enrichment of interstellar methanol is reproduced experimentally for the first time via grain-surface H-D substitution in solid methanol at an atomic D/H ratio of 0.1. Although previous gas-grain models successfully reproduce the…
Aims: The gas-phase abundance of methanol in dark quiescent cores in the interstellar medium cannot be explained by gas-phase chemistry. In fact, the only possible synthesis of this species appears to be production on the surfaces of dust…
Methanol and complex organic molecules have been found in cold starless cores, where a standard warm-up scenario would not work because of the absence of heat sources. A recent chemical model attributed the presence of methanol and large…