OBSERVATIONAL PROJECTS - BERKELEY
Carbon Chains in the Diffuse Interstellar Medium
A useful by-product of our DIB observations has been the detection
of the C3 band at 4051 Angstroms in a set of 10 highly
reddened translucent cloud sightlines. However, the resolving power
of the APO echelle is not sufficient to rotationally resolve the band,
so Mate Adamkovics (a chemistry graduate student at Berkeley) and I
decided to follow up the APO detections using the Hamilton echelle
at Lick Observatory. Those followup observations, together with some
data obtained in collaboration with Geoff Blake (Caltech) at Keck
Observatory, yielded 10 rotationally-resolved detections of C3.
Interestingly, the column densities of C2 and C3 seem
to be fairly well correlated in this sample of sightlines. Because of our
high signal-to-noise ratios and resolution, we were able not only to
determine accurate column densities, but also to analyze the rotational
excitation of C3 in some detail. A deep search is underway
(at Keck) for the spectra of the longer carbon chains C4
and C5.
References:
| M. Adamkovics, G. A. Blake, and B. J. McCall
Observations of Rotationally Resolved C3 in Translucent Sight Lines Astrophysical Journal, 595 (Sept. 20, 2003), in press |
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T. Oka, J. A. Thorburn, B. J. McCall, S. D. Friedman, L. M. Hobbs, P.
Sonnentrucker,
D. E. Welty, and D. G. York
Observations of C3 in Translucent Sightlines Astrophysical Journal, 582, 823 (2003) |
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