4.6 Article

A rigorous detection of interstellar CH3NCO: An important missing species in astrochemical networks

Journal

ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS
Volume 587, Issue -, Pages -

Publisher

EDP SCIENCES S A
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201527531

Keywords

ISM: abundances; ISM: individual objects: Orion KL; ISM: molecules; methods: laboratory: molecular; molecular data; ISM: clouds

Funding

  1. CONSOLIDER-Ingenio program ASTROMOL [CSD 2009-00038, AYA2012-32032, CTQ 2013-40717 P, CTQ 2010-19008]
  2. ERC synergy grant [ERC-2013-Syg-610256-NANOCOSMOS]
  3. Junta de Castilla y Leon [VA070A08, VA175U13]
  4. Polish National Science Centre [DEC/2011/02/A/ST2/00298]
  5. IMOLABS [ANR-13-BS05-0008-02]
  6. Program PCMI (INSU-CNRS)
  7. Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES)
  8. NASA
  9. NSF
  10. Army Research Office
  11. Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien
  12. Division Of Astronomical Sciences [1211476] Funding Source: National Science Foundation

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The recent analysis of the composition of the frozen surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has revealed a significant number of complex organic molecules. Methyl isocyanate (CH3NCO) is one of the more abundant species detected on the comet surface. In this work we report extensive characterization of its rotational spectrum resulting in a list of 1269 confidently assigned laboratory lines and its detection in space towards the Orion clouds where 399 lines of the molecule have been unambiguously identified. We find that the limited mm-wave laboratory data reported prior to our work require some revision. The abundance of CH3NCO in Orion is only a factor of ten below those of HNCO and CH3CN. Unlike the molecular abundances in the coma of comets, which correlate with those of warm molecular clouds, molecular abundances in the gas phase in Orion are only weakly correlated with those measured on the comet surface. We also compare our abundances with those derived recently for this molecule towards Sgr B2 (Halfen et al. 2015, ApJ, 812, L5). A more accurate abundance of CH3NCO is provided for this cloud based on our extensive laboratory work.

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