Lecture
Reedijk Symposium 2024: Molecular Cocktails on the Rocks: chemistry of ices in stellar nurseries
- Date
- Friday 22 November 2024
- Time
- Location
-
Lecture Hall
Einsteinweg 57
2333 CC Leiden - Room
- C1
Abstract
The darkness readily observed between the stars on a clear night sky is far from empty. In fact, a large variety of molecules has been detected in the gas phase. They make up about 99% of the total mass in the interstellar medium. The final 1% of mass is contained in micron-sized dust grains that once were expelled by dying stars.
In cold, dense interstellar regions, atoms and molecules adsorb, diffuse, and react on the surfaces of these dust grains, after which they can evaporate back into the gas phase. This leads to the build-up of molecular icy mantles of up to 100 monolayers thick. The interplay between the different surfaces processes determines which molecules are formed, where, and whether or not they are astronomically observable, either in the solid or gas phase. In order to quantitatively disentangle the relative importance on realistic amorphous ices one can make use of computational chemistry. This way me and my group aim to provide coarse-grained astrochemical models with crucial input parameters, such as branching ratios, binding energies, rate constants, and energy dissipation efficiencies.
I will focus on surface processes of molecules containing elements crucial to life, CHONS, and known to be present in cold interstellar regions to illustrate how binding, reactivity and dissipation go hand in hand. I aim to show the multi-faceted aspects of astrochemistry, linking our work to observational astronomy, and recent results obtained with the James Webb Space Telescope in particular.
Biography
Thanja Lamberts is a shared assistant professor at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry and Leiden Observatory. Her group focuses on computational astrochemistry to unravel which molecules can be formed efficiently in the dense regions of the interstellar medium. She is particularly interested in the chemistry that takes place on the surface of ice-coated dust grains.
Her background consists of a joint experimental and modelling PhD with Prof. Harold Linnartz at the Laboratory for Astrophysics in Leiden in close collaboration with Prof. Herma Cuppen in Nijmegen (who also speaks at the Reedijk symposium). She then moved to Stuttgart to pursue computational chemistry with Prof. Johannes Kästner, and was awarded a Humboldt Fellowship. She returned to Leiden to work with Dr. Jörg Meyer at the LIC with a Veni fellowship. Thanja is furthermore part of the Young Academy Leiden and the board of the KNCV subsection for Computational and Theoretical Chemistry and she frequently partakes in outreach events. Most recently in the Dutch BNN/Vara program Proefkonijnen.