The Galactic Center: The Largest Oxygen-bearing Organic Molecule Repository

By M. Requena-Torres, Jesús Martín-Pintado, S. Martín, Mark R. Morris. 2007

160 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the first detection of complex aldehydes and isomers in three typical molecular clouds located within 200 pc of the center of our Galaxy. We find very large abundances of these complex organic molecules (COMs) in the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ), which we attribute to the ejection of COMs from grain mantles by shocks. The relative abundances of the different COMs with respect to that of CH3OH are strikingly similar for the three sources, which are located in very different environments in the CMZ. The similar relative abundances point toward a unique grain mantle composition in the CMZ. Studying the Galactic center clouds and objects in the Galactic disk having large abundances of COMs, we find that more saturated molecules are more abundant than the nonsaturated ones. We also find differences between the relative abundance between COMs in the CMZ and the Galactic disk, suggesting different chemical histories of the grain mantles between the two regions in the Galaxy for the complex aldehydes. Different possibilities for the grain chemistry on the icy mantles in the GC clouds are briefly discussed. Cosmic rays can play an important role in the grain chemistry. With these new detections, the molecular clouds in the Galactic center appear to be one of the best laboratories for studying the formation of COMs in the Galaxy.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Spectroscopy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ffca05534e5c4952b8faa9740d3e3306b0699ae

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Citations in the corpus

Formation rates of complex organics in UV irradiated CH3OH-rich ices I: Experiments (2009, result): “Similar reaction schemes are suggested to explain observations by e.g. Bisschop et al. (2008) and Requena-Torres et al. (2008).”
Spectral imaging of the Central Molecular Zone in multiple 3-mm molecular lines (2011, background): “…complex molecules are extended over the larger CMZ area as shown by widespread CH3OH (methanol) at 834 MHz detected by Gottlieb et al. (1979), HNCO (isocyanic acid) at 110 GHz imaged by Dahmen et al. (1997) and complex organic molecules detected in individual clouds by Requena-Torres et al. (2008).”
Formation of ethylene glycol and other complex organic molecules in star-forming regions (2016, background): “EG is the reduced alcohol of GA, and it was first found in the ISM also towards the Galactic Center (Hollis et al. 2002; Requena-Torres et al. 2008; Belloche et al. 2013).”
DETECTION OF THE SIMPLEST SUGAR, GLYCOLALDEHYDE, IN A SOLAR-TYPE PROTOSTAR WITH ALMA (2012, background): “41+0.31 (Beltrán et al. 2009) to the average of 5–6.5 found on more extended scales toward SgrB2(N) (Hollis et al. 2000; Requena-Torres et al. 2008).”