We study the formation and evolution of several molecules in a collapsing interstellar cloud using a reasonably large reaction network containing more then four hundred atomic and molecular species. We employ a time dependent, spherically symmetric, hydrodynamics code to follow the hydrodynamic and chemical evolution of the collapsing cloud. The flow is assumed to be self-gravitating. We use two models to study the hydrodynamic evolution: in the first model, we inject matter into an initially low density 2 Das et al.region and in the second model, we start with a constant density cloud and let it collapse due to self-gravity. We study the evolution of the central core for both the cases. We include the grain chemistry to compute the formation of molecular hydrogen and carried out the effect of gas and grain chemistry at each time step. We follow the collapse for more than 1014 s (about 3 million years) and present the time evolution of the globally averaged abundances of various simple but biologically important molecules, such as glycine, alanine etc. We compare our results with those obtained from observations found that for lighter molecules the agreement is generally very good. For complex molecules we tend to under predict the abundances. This indicates that other pathways could be present to form these molecules or more accurate reaction rates were needed.
Abstract. We show evidences for anomalous ionospheric behaviour in the signal of Indian navy VLF transmitting station named VTX due to earthquakes in the South Asian region. We concentrate on the variation of the D-layer preparation time (DLPT) and D-layer disappearance time (DLDT) in a period of sixteen months and study their average behaviors. We identify those days in which DLPT and DLDT exhibit significant deviations. Separately, we compute the energy release by earthquakes during this period and show that "anomalous VLF" days are associated with anomalous energy release. We find that the anomaly and the deviation of DLPT and DLDTs from the mean are linearly correlated. We discuss the predictability in this approach and compare with the terminator shift approach using the same set of data.
One of the stumbling blocks for studying the evolution of interstellar molecules is the lack of adequate knowledge of the rate co-efficients of various reactions which take place in the Interstellar medium and molecular clouds. Some of the theoretical models of rate coefficients do exist in the literature for computing abundances of the complex prebiotic molecules. So far these have been used to study the abundances of these molecules in space. However, in order to obtain more accurate final compositions in these media, we find out the rate coefficients for the formation of some of the most important interstellar pre-biotic molecules by using quantum chemical theory. We use these rates inside our hydro-chemical model to find out the chemical evolution and the final abundances of the pre-biotic species during the collapsing phase of a proto-star. We find that a significant amount of various pre-biotic molecules could be produced during the collapsing phase of a proto-star. We study extensively the formation these molecules via successive neutralneutral and radical-radical/radical-molecular reactions. We present the time evolution of the chemical species with an emphasis on how the production of these molecules varies with the depth of a cloud. We compare the formation of adenine in the interstellar space using our rate-coefficients and using those obtained from the existing theoretical models. Formation routes of the pre-biotic molecules are found to be highly dependent on the abundances of the reactive species and the rate coefficients involved in the reactions. Presence of grains strongly affect the abundances of the gas phase species. We also carry out a comparative study between different pathways available for the synthesis of adenine, alanine, glycine and other molecules considered in our network. Despite the huge abundances of the neutral reactive species, production of adenine is found to be highly dominated by the radical-radical/radical-molecular reaction pathways. If all the reactions considered here are contributing for the production of alanine and glycine, then neutralneutral & radical-radical/radical-molecular pathways both are found to have significant contribution for the production of alanine, whereas radical-radical/radical-molecular pathways plays a major role in case of glycine production.
Aims. We study the formation of water and methanol in the dense cloud conditions to find the dependence of its production rate on the binding energies, reaction mechanisms, temperatures, and grain site number. We wish to find the effective grain surface area available for chemical reaction and the effective recombination timescales as functions of grain and gas parameters. Methods. We used a Monte Carlo simulation to follow the chemical processes occurring on the grain surface. We carried out the simulations on the Olivine grains of different sizes, temperatures, gas phase abundances and different reaction mechanisms. We consider H, O, and CO as the accreting species from the gas phase and allow ten chemical reactions among them on the grains. Results. We find that the formation rate of various molecules is strongly dependent on the binding energies. When the binding energies are high, it is very difficult to produce significant amounts of the molecular species. Instead, the grain is found to be full of atomic species. The production rates are found to depend on the number density in the gas phase. When the density is high, the production of various molecules on the grains is small as grain sites are quickly filled up by atomic species. If both the Eley-Rideal and Langmuir-Hinselwood mechanisms are considered, then the production rates are maximum and the grains are filled up relatively faster. Thus, if allowed, the Eley-Rideal mechanism can also play a major role and more so when the grain is full of immobile species. We show that the concept of the effective grain surface area, which we introduced in our earlier work, plays a significant role in grain chemistry. Conclusions. We compute the abundance of water and methanol and show that the results strongly depend on the density and composition in the gas phase, as well as various grain parameters. In the rate equation, it is generally assumed that the recombination efficiencies are independent of the grain parameters, and the surface coverage. Presently, our computed parameter α for each product is found to depend on the accretion rate, the grain parameters and the surface coverage of the grain. We compare our results obtained from the rate equation and the one from the effective rate equation, which includes α. A comparison of our results with the observed abundance shows very good agreement.
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