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Updated: Nov 12, 2025

Chromatographic Fingerprinting by Template Matching for Data Collected by Comprehensive Two-Dimensional Gas Chromatography
Published on: September 2, 2020
Detection of two interstellar polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons via spectral matched filtering
Brett A McGuire1,2,3, Ryan A Loomis2, Andrew M Burkhardt3
1Department of Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. brettmc@mit.edu.
Abstract:
Unidentified infrared emission bands are ubiquitous in many astronomical sources. These bands are widely, if not unanimously, attributed to collective emissions from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) molecules, yet no single species of this class has been identified in space. Using spectral matched filtering of radio data from the Green Bank Telescope, we detected two nitrile-group-functionalized PAHs, 1- and 2-cyanonaphthalene, in the interstellar medium. Both bicyclic ring molecules were observed in the TMC-1 molecular cloud. In this paper, we discuss potential in situ gas-phase PAH formation pathways from smaller organic precursor molecules.
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