Space might seem almost empty, but is it really? In recent years, powerful new telescopes, including Alma (the Atacama Large Millimetre Array) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST, launched in 2021) have further revealed the chemical complexity of the gaps between stars & planets, showing that these extreme and often very cold environments are in fact home to abundant amounts of complex chemistry. These spectroscopic detections have heralded huge changes in our understanding of what makes up what we thought were empty regions of space, identifying over two hundred different chemical species. Yet, as much as we know, scientists still need to answer the question of how these species are formed.
For the multidisciplinary field of astrochemistry - bringing together researchers from astronomy, gas-phase, solid state and more - the high-resolution spectra obtained by these telescopes has provided a wealth of new observational data. They show that much of the observed chemistry occurs within interstellar gas and on icy grains of dust, as well as in the denser environments of young planetary atmospheres and within the cores of comets.
In this hour-long recording from the live webinar, you’ll meet scientists working at the forefront of astrochemistry research and learn how they recreate the extreme environments of space here on Earth.
The Royal Society of Chemistry has some excellent books on this topic - you can find a couple of them here:
books.rsc.org/books/monograph...
books.rsc.org/books/monograph...
13 ноя 2023
