Recently in the Astrochemistry Category

In an effort to further our interest in understanding basic chemistry of interstellar molecules, we carry out here an extensive investigation of the stabilities of interstellar carbon chains; Cn, H2Cn, HCnN and CnX (X=N, O, Si, S, H, P, H-, N-).

The interstellar medium is characterized by a rich and diverse chemistry. Many of its complex organic molecules are proposed to form through radical chemistry in icy grain mantles.

Since the orbital insertion of the Rosetta spacecraft, comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P/C-G) has been mapped by OSIRIS camera and VIRTIS spectro-imager, producing a huge quantity of images and spectra of the comet's nucleus.

Research by Rice University Earth scientists suggests that virtually all of Earth's life-giving carbon could have come from a collision about 4.4 billion years ago between Earth and an embryonic planet similar to Mercury.

We study the molecular abundance and spatial distribution of the simplest sugar alcohol, ethylene glycol (EG), the simplest sugar glycoladehyde (GA), and other chemically related complex organic species towards the massive star-forming region G31.41+0.31.

The abundance of key molecules determines the level of cooling that is necessary for the formation of stars and planetary systems. In this context, one needs to understand the details of the time dependent oxygen chemistry, leading to the formation of molecular oxygen and water.

Physicists from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have succeeded in detecting a time-resolved supernova signal in the Earth's microfossil record.

Collisions of ice particles play an important role in the formation of planetesimals and comets. In recent work we showed, that CO2 ice behaves like silicates in collisions.

We develop a simple model to predict the radial distribution of planetesimal formation. The model is based on the observed growth of dust to mm-sized particles, which drift radially, pile-up, and form planetesimals where the stopping time and dust-to-gas ratio intersect the allowed region for streaming instability-induced gravitational collapse.

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have taken a big step toward the laboratory re-creation of the "RNA world," which is generally believed to have preceded modern life forms based on DNA and proteins.