Related papers: Adenine Abundance in a Collapsing Molecular Cloud
Using a reasonably large chemical reaction network consisting of 421 species, we show that along with normal chemical evolution of molecular cloud during collapse and star formation, significant amount of adenine, a DNA base, may be…
Understanding the gas abundance distribution is essential when tracing star formation using molecular line observations. Changing density and temperature conditions cause gas to freeze-out onto dust grains, and this needs to be taken into…
One of the stumbling blocks for studying the evolution of interstellar molecules is the lack of adequate knowledge of the rate co-efficients of various reactions which take place in the Interstellar medium and molecular clouds. Some of the…
A broad array of interstellar absorption features that appear in the ultraviolet spectra of bright sources allows us to measure the abundances and ionization states of many important heavy elements that exist as free atoms in the…
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…
The physical conditions in a collapsing cloud can be traced by observations of molecular lines. To correctly interpret these observations the abundance distributions of the observed species need to be derived. The chemistry in a collapsing…
Clouds containing molecular dark matter in quantities relevant for star formation may exist in minihaloes of the type of cold dark matter included in many cosmological simulations or in the regions of some galaxies extending far beyond…
Much of what we know about molecular clouds, and by extension star formation, comes from molecular line observations. Interpreting these correctly requires knowledge of the underlying molecular abundances. Simulations of molecular clouds…
Hydrogen cyanide (HCN) is a key feedstock molecule for the production of life's building blocks. The formation of HCN in an N$_2$-rich atmospheres requires first that the triple bond between N$\equiv$N be severed, and then that the atomic…
We investigate the chemical evolution of a forming molecular cloud behind an interstellar shock wave. We conduct three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamics simulations of the converging flow of atomic gas, including a simple chemical network…
Methods to determine abundances of the elements in the atmospheres of F, G, and K stars with precisions of 0.01-0.03 dex are reviewed. Such high-precision stellar abundances have led to the discovery of unexpected phenomena and relations…
Many nucleosynthetic channels create the elements, but two-parameter models characterized by $\alpha$ and Fe nonetheless predict stellar abundances in the Galactic disk to accuracies of 0.02 to 0.05 dex for most measured elements, near the…
Some studies of stars' multi-element abundance distributions suggest at least 5-7 significant dimensions, but others show that many elemental abundances can be predicted to high accuracy from [Fe/H] and [Mg/Fe] (or [Fe/H] and age) alone. We…
Gas in galactic disks is collected by gravitational instabilities into giant atomic-molecular complexes, but only the inner, molecular parts of these structures are able to collapse to form stars. Determining what controls the ratio of…
It is long debated if pre-biotic molecules are indeed present in the interstellar medium. Despite substantial works pointing to their existence, pre-biotic molecules are yet to be discovered with a complete confidence. In this paper, our…
Neutron(n)-capture elements are produced by s-process nucleosynthesis in low- and intermediate-mass AGB stars, and therefore can be enriched in planetary nebulae (PNe). In the last ten years, n-capture elements have been detected in more…
We study the formation and evolution of several molecules in a collapsing interstellar cloud using a reasonably large reaction network containing more then four hundred atomic and molecular species. We employ a time dependent, spherically…
The chemical composition of the Sun is among the most important quantities in astrophysics. Solar abundances are needed for modelling stellar atmospheres, stellar structure and evolution, population synthesis, and galaxies as a whole. The…
Within a few parsecs around the central Black Hole Sgr A*, chemistry in the dense molecular cloud material of the circumnuclear disk (CND) can be affected by many energetic phenomena such as high UV-flux from the massive central star…
HNC and HCN, typically used as dense gas tracers in molecular clouds, are a pair of isomers that have great potential as a temperature probe because of temperature dependent, isomer-specific formation and destruction pathways. Previous…