Astrolunch - 27th March

Maria Cunningham:
New Results from the Mopra Telescope

I will give an informal talk about new results for two projects I have been pursuing with the Mopra Telescope. The first is a search for biomolecules conducted with the Mopra Telescope during UNSW time in 2002 and 2003. Mopra is now the proud bearer of the lowest upper limit for glycine in the ISM in the usual suspects (Sgr B2 and Orion A), and has been definitively able to rule out the claimed detection of Kuan et al. in 2003. The second result is more recent. During 2006 the dense gas tracer N2H+ was observed in the G333 molecular cloud as part of the UNSW DQS survey. The molecule has a surprising distribution, which may be telling us something about the formation mechanisms for massive stars.