Interstellar detection of the highly polar five-membered ring cyanocyclopentadiene
Name
2009.13546.pdf
Description
Accepted version
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10.96 MB
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Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
McCarthy, Michael C
Lee, Kin Long Kelvin
Loomis, Ryan A
Burkhardt, Andrew M
Shingledecker, Christopher N
Charnley, Steven B
Cordiner, Martin A
Herbst, Eric
Kalenskii, Sergei
Willis, Eric R
Date Issued
2021
Journal
Nature Astronomy
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
McCarthy, Michael C, Lee, Kin Long Kelvin, Loomis, Ryan A, Burkhardt, Andrew M, Shingledecker, Christopher N et al. 2021. "Interstellar detection of the highly polar five-membered ring cyanocyclopentadiene." Nature Astronomy, 5 (2).
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2020, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. Much like six-membered rings, five-membered rings are ubiquitous in organic chemistry, frequently serving as the building blocks for larger molecules, including many of biochemical importance. From a combination of laboratory rotational spectroscopy and a sensitive spectral line survey in the radio band toward the starless cloud core TMC-1, we report the astronomical detection of 1-cyano-1,3-cyclopentadiene (1-cyano-CPD, c-C5H5CN), a highly polar, cyano derivative of cyclopentadiene. The derived abundance of 1-cyano-CPD is far greater than predicted from astrochemical models that well reproduce the abundance of many carbon chains. This finding implies that either an important production mechanism or a large reservoir of aromatic material may need to be considered. The apparent absence of its closely related isomer, 2-cyano-1,3-cyclopentadiene, may arise from that isomer’s lower stability or may be indicative of a more selective pathway for formation of the 1-cyano isomer, perhaps one starting from acyclic precursors. The absence of N-heterocycles such as pyrrole and pyridine is discussed in light of the astronomical finding of 1-cyano-CPD.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemistry
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/S41550-020-01213-Y
