Small molecules from the decomposition of interstellar carbons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We have studied the molecular products of the photo-induced decomposition of hydrogenated amorphous carbon (HAC) and solid hexane, C6H14, using mass spectroscopy. Mass spectra of HAC are dominated by simple hydrocarbon molecules having fewer than four carbon atoms. Notable products include C3H2, phenyl, C6H5, benzene, C6H6, and a variety of partially dehydrogenated alkane molecules with the composition CnH2n-1. Hexane, chosen as a representative solid alkane, has a more complex mass spectrum which includes Cn and a number of hydrocarbon molecules with up to 10 carbon atoms. As alkyl radicals, CnH2n-1, are commonly found in the decomposition of alkanes, we have used high precision density functional theory to simulate the infrared spectrum of 1-, 2-, and 3-hexyl radicals as well as that of the 3-hexyl ion, C6H13+. The latter could be detectable in interstellar/circumstellar sources via a strong feature at 3.66 μm. The appearance of C3H2 as a decomposition product of photodissociated HAC may be related to the ubiquitous presence of c-C3H2 in the interstellar medium. The production of such molecules in the interstellar medium through a ‘top-down’ chemistry deriving from the decomposition of HAC is discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".