Astrochemistry

Tentative Detection Of Cyanoformamide NCCONH2 In Space

By Keith Cowing

Status Report

astro-ph.GA

November 7, 2023

Filed under ALMA, astro-ph.GA, astrochemistry, cyanoformamide, interstellar medium, nucleic acid precursor, Sagittarius B2(N1E)

Tentative Detection Of Cyanoformamide NCCONH2 In Space — Integrated intensity map of NH2CHO and CH13 3 CN in Sgr B2(N1). The integrated intensity map of NH2CHO at 103.525 GHz are shown in color scale. The integrated intensity map of CH13 3 CN at 91.94 GHz is shown in contours, which represent 30% to 90% percent of peak integrated intensity. The white crosses indicate the position of Sgr B2(N1E), Sgr B2(N1S), and the center of Sgr B2(N1). The white ellipse shows the size of the respective synthetic beam. — astro-ph.GA

The peptide-like molecules, cyanoformamide (NCCONH2), is the cyano (CN) derivative of formamide (NH2CHO). It is known to play a role in the synthesis of nucleic acid precursors under prebiotic conditions.

In this paper, we present a tentative detection of NCCONH2 in the interstellar medium (ISM) with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) archive data. Ten unblended lines of NCCONH2 were seen around 3sigma noise levels toward Sagittarius B2(N1E), a position that is slightly offset from the continuum peak.

The column density of NCCONH2 was estimated to be 2.4\times 10^15 cm ^-2, and the fractional abundance of NCCONH2 toward Sgr B2(N1E) was 6.9\times10^-10. The abundance ratio between NCCONH2 and NH2CHO is estimated to be ~0.01. We also searched for other peptide-like molecules toward Sgr B2(N1E). The abundances of NH2CHO, CH3NCO and CH3NHCHO toward Sgr B2(N1E) were about one tenth of those toward Sgr B2(N1S), while the abundances of CH3CONH2 was only one twentieth of that toward Sgr B2(N1S).

Juan Li, Donghui Quan, Junzhi Wang, Xia Zhang, Xing Lu, Qian Gou, Feng Gao, Yajun Wu, Edwin Bergin, Shanghuo Li, Zhiqiang Shen, Fujun Du, Meng Li, Siqi Zheng, Xingwu Zheng

Comments: 20 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, accepted by PASJ. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2108.05001
Subjects: Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA); Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
Cite as: arXiv:2311.01721 [astro-ph.GA] (or arXiv:2311.01721v1 [astro-ph.GA] for this version)
Submission history
From: Juan Li
[v1] Fri, 3 Nov 2023 05:28:33 UTC (525 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01721
Astrobiology, Astrochemistry

Keith Cowing

Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist, Away Teams, Journalist, Lapsed climber, Synaesthete, Na’Vi-Jedi-Freman-Buddhist-mix, ASL, Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran, (he/him) 🖖🏻

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