Related papers: High NH2D/NH3 ratios in protostellar cores
Gas-phase and solid-state chemistry in low-temperature interstellar clouds and cores leads to a D/H enhancement in interstellar ices, which is eventually inherited by comets, meteorites, and even planetary satellites. Hence, the D/ H ratio…
Measurements of the nitrogen isotopic ratio in Solar System comets show a constant value, ~140, which is three times lower than the protosolar ratio, a highly significant difference that remains unexplained. Observations of static starless…
Finding tracers of the innermost regions of prestellar cores is important for understanding their chemical and dynamical evolution before the onset of gravitational collapse. While classical molecular tracers, such as CO and CS, have been…
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…
The uncertainties which still plague our understanding of the evolution of the light nuclides D, 3He and 4He in the Galaxy are described. Measurements of the local abundance of deuterium range over a factor of 3. The observed dispersion can…
(Abridged) We present evidence that low-mass starless cores, the simplest units of star formation, are systematically differentiated in their chemical composition. Molecules including CO and CS almost vanish near the core centers, where the…
Although the deuterium fraction is known to be a powerful evolutionary tracer, its variation within individual molecular cloud cores is still poorly understood. The northern $\int$-shaped filament and 20 individual starless cores in the…
H2S is thought to be the main sulphur reservoir in the ice, being therefore a key molecule to understand sulphur chemistry in the star formation process and to solve the missing sulphur problem. The H2S deuterium fraction can be used to…
Analyses of spectra obtained with the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) satellite, together with spectra from the Copernicus and IMAPS instruments, reveal an unexplained very wide range in the observed deuterium/hydrogen (D/H)…
We investigate water and deuterated water chemistry in turbulent protoplanetary disks. Chemical rate equations are solved with the diffusion term, mimicking turbulent mixing in vertical direction. Water near the midplane is transported to…
Recent observations of the HDO/H$_2$O ratio toward protostars in isolated and clustered environments show an apparent dichotomy, where isolated sources show higher D/H ratios than clustered counterparts. Establishing which physical and…
Context. The increased sensitivity and high spectral resolution of millimeter telescopes allow the detection of an increasing number of isotopically substituted molecules in the interstellar medium. The 14N/ 15N ratio is difficult to…
We present a survey of HCO+ (3-2) observations pointed towards dense cores with previous measurements of N(N2D+)/N(N2H+). Of the 26 cores in this survey, five show the spectroscopic signature of outward motion, nine exhibit neither inward…
Ammonia and its deuterated isotopologues probe physical conditions in dense molecular cloud cores. With the aim of testing the current understanding of the spin-state chemistry of these molecules, we observed spectral lines of NH3, NH2D,…
We have studied the chemistry of nitrogen--bearing species during the initial stages of protostellar collapse, with a view to explaining the observed longevity of N2H+ and NH3 and the high levels of deuteration of these species. We followed…
Mono-deuterated methanol is thought to form during the prestellar core stage of star formation. Observed variations in the CH2DOH/CH3OD ratio suggest that its formation is strongly dependent on the surrounding cloud conditions. Thus, it is…
(Abridged) The terrestrial planets, comets, and meteorites are significantly enriched in 15N compared to the Sun and Jupiter. While the solar and jovian nitrogen isotope ratio is believed to represent the composition of the protosolar…
The predictions of Galactic chemical evolution models for D and $^3$He are described in connection with those on the other Galactic quantities for which observational constraints are available. Models in agreement with the largest set of…
We upgraded the chemical network from the UMIST Database for Astrochemistry 2006 to include isotopes such as ^{13}C and ^{18}O. This includes all corresponding isotopologues, their chemical reactions and the properly scaled reaction rate…
The primordial abundance of deuterium (D/H) yields a measure of the density of baryons in the universe and is an important complement to determinations from cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. Indeed, the current small sample of…