Astrochemistry

© Courtesy NASA/JPL/R. Hurt (SSC)

Helen Fraser, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

Keynote Speakers:

David Clary, University of Oxford, UK 

Ewine van Dishoeck, Leiden University, The Netherlands

Eric Herbst, The Ohio State University, USA

Bruce Kay, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA

Stephen Leone, University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA 

Speakers: 

Ludovic Biennier, Université de Rennes 1, France

Francois Dulieu, Universite de Cergy-Pontoise, France

Wolf Geppert, Stockholm University, Sweden 

Liv Hornekaer, University of Aarhus, Denmark 

Mike McCarthy, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA 

Helen Roberts, Queen's University Belfast, UK

Programme:

Monday 3 August (morning and afternoon)

Tuesday 4 August (morning and afternoon)

Wednesday 5 August (morning)

Symposium Information

Astrochemistry is the science that combines chemistry and astronomy, and has, over the past decade, proved a formidable interdisciplinary subject, attracting researchers from chemistry and astronomy, as well as physics, biology, materials and geosciences. The field holds huge potential to chemists as a place where their science can evolve, cross boundaries and to strike up new collaborations and applications.

From an astronomical perspective, our understanding of our local universe relies on spectroscopic techniques, light absorbed and emitted by atoms and molecules in distant stars and galaxies, or interstellar and intergalactic space, is key to elucidating the temperature, density and dynamical profiles of regions of star and planet formation as well as extra-galactic structure. Astronomers therefore require detailed data on atomic and molecular spectra, but also use the chemical evolution of astronomical objects as a 'clock', and such applications require detailed understanding of chemical reactions, rates, branching, and of chemical processes occurring in 'extreme' extraterrestrial conditions.

From a chemical perspective, research in Astrochemistry encompasses a wide range of chemical physics fields, from direct molecular detection and laboratory spectroscopy, through non-Arrhenius behaviour in neutral-neutral reactions at low pressures and temperatures in the gas phase, to surface chemistry, involving electron and photon induced surface processes as well as studies of surface reactivity and desorption at low temperatures.

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, and seems a very appropriate time to bring Astrochemistry to the wider chemical research audience - work on doubly charged ions, combustion chemistry, nano-particle catalysis and condensed matter all has a bearing on the chemistry of star and planet formation and the potential for extraterrestrial life.