New Telescopes, New Expectations, Puzzling Results

Séminaire IPAG de Eric Herbst (U. of Virginia), jeudi 27 septembre 2012 à 11h00, IPAG seminar room

The exciting new spectral results from the Herschel Space Observatory, SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy), and ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array) among other telescopes are leading astrochemists into a new era, in which our current level of understanding of the molecular universe will be challenged as never before. New observations of both reasonably well-known and novel environments with exquisite spatial detail plus vastly increased spectral intensity will quickly yield a huge amount of data, much of which will require new and more detailed chemical simulations to understand. In my talk, I will emphasize some new results about the interstellar medium in our galaxy and others that are not fully understandable in terms of the environments we thought we knew well. These results include the existence of organic molecules in the vicinity of black holes, the detection of strong spectra from species that should be destroyed on every collision with H2, the dominant interstellar molecule, the detection of polyatomic molecules in diffuse clouds, and the observation of highly unusual ortho-to-para abundance ratios.