B. A. McGuire, R. A. Loomis, A. M. Burkhardt, K. L. K. Lee, C. N. Shingledecker, S. B. Charnley, I. R. Cooke, M. A. Cordiner, E. Herbst, S. Kalenskii, M. A. Siebert, E. R. Willis, C. Xue, A. J. Remijan, M. C. McCarthy
reported on the
Detection of two interstellar polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons via spectral matched filtering
Science 371, 1265−1269 (2021).
The observations were obtained in the course of the line survey Green Bank Telescope Observations of TMC-1: Hunting for Aromatic Molecules. The data were recorded with very high resolution which resolves, at least in part, the complex velocity structure and the ¹⁴N hyperfine structure splitting. The molecules 1-cyanonaphtalene and 2-cyanonaphtalene were indentified through line-stacking with good signal-to-noise ratios. In fact, after additional observations carried out in the review process, the S/Ns of some lines of 1-cyanonaphtalene were good enough to be identified individually after modest smoothing. Both molecules are obviously not hydrocarbons, but simple hydrocarbon derivatives.

Contributor(s): H. S. P. Müller; 04, 2021