Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Carriers Of The Interstellar Unidentified Infrared Emission Features: Constraints From The Interstellar C-H Stretching Features At 3.2-3.5 Μm, Xuejuan Yang, Rainer Glaser, Aigen Li, Jianxin Zhong

Chemistry Faculty Research & Creative Works

The unidentified infrared emission (UIE) features at 3.3, 6.2, 7.7, 8.6, and 11.3 μm, commonly attributed to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) molecules, have recently been ascribed to mixed aromatic/aliphatic organic nanoparticles. More recently, an upper limit of <9% was placed on the aliphatic fraction (i.e., the fraction of carbon atoms in aliphatic form) of the UIE carriers based on the observed intensities of the 3.4 μm and 3.3 μm emission features by attributing them to aliphatic and aromatic C-H stretching modes, respectively, and assuming A _3.4/A _3.3 ≈ 0.68 derived from a small set of aliphatic and aromatic compounds, where A _3.4 and A _3.3 are, respectively, the band strengths of the 3.4 μm aliphatic and 3.3 μm aromatic C-H bonds. To improve the estimate of the aliphatic fraction of the UIE carriers, here we analyze 35 UIE sources exhibiting both the 3.3 μm and …