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Search for Interstellar Glycine

F. Combes, Nguyen-Q-Rieu, G. Wlodarczak
Observatoire de Paris (France)
Université de Lille (France)
Abstract: Because of its central biological significance, glycine has extensively been searched for in the 1980s, after the laboratory determination of its millimeter-wave spectrum in 1978. Using the 30m IRAM telescope, we have recently carried out high sensitivity observations to search for both conformers I and II of glycine in several spectral regions at 3 mm (around 101 GHz, 107 GHz, 111 GHz), at 2 mm (around 136 GHz and 144 GHz), and at 1.4 mm (around 217 GHz and 223 GHz) with a bandwidth of 512 MHz. The targets were Orion and Sagittarius-B2. We covered spectral regions which included 98 expected lines of glycine: some did show some signal at various levels (10mK-1K), but many were not detected, while comparable signals are expected. Since the level of confusion is reached in Orion, we believe that glycine is below the confusion limit, and will be impossible to detect in this source, as well as other complex molecules of similar or lower abundance (). During these observations, we detected 334 lines in Orion, 157 of which are unidentified.

Robert Lucas
Mon Sep 18 09:50:01 METDST 1995