Title
Testing the Limits of Astrochemistry
Integrative Studies in Laboratory Spectroscopy, Observational Astronomy, and Chemical Modeling

Speaker
Susanna L. Widicus Weaver
Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Emory University

Dr. Widicus Weaver and her group (pictured above at the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Radio Telescope) conduct research in the emerging field of prebiotic astrochemistry, where they investigate the chemical mechanisms in space that lead to the development of biological systems.

You can find out more about their research efforts by visiting the Widicus Weaver Group website.

Description
It is now thought that meteorite and comet impacts delivered water and biological material to the early Earth, seeding the formation of life. Fundamental biological molecules such as amino acids and sugars have been discovered in meteorites, but none of these species have yet been detected in the interstellar medium. The mechanisms and environments leading to the formation of biologically-relevant molecules therefore remain unclear. While both the number of detected interstellar molecules and their chemical complexity continue to increase, our understanding of the processes leading to their formation is severely lacking. Only interdisciplinary studies with contributions from laboratory spectroscopy, observational astronomy, and chemical modeling will enable us to elucidate the dominant chemical mechanisms in space. In this talk, I will discuss our research program that fully integrates these three fields of study. In the laboratory, we are developing new high-sensitivity spectral techniques for the terahertz (THz) frequency range. We are combining these techniques with novel production mechanisms to study transient molecules that are key to prebiotic chemical pathways in the ISM. We will use the spectroscopic results as a guide to search for these molecules in space. From these astronomical observations, we can determine the abundance, temperature, and spatial distribution of these species in interstellar clouds. We then incorporate this information into interstellar chemical models and test the influence of varying physical conditions. The revised models can be used to predict other important chemical pathways, guiding future laboratory and observational studies. Such studies will enable us to pinpoint the interstellar chemical pathways leading to biological molecules and offer clues to the processes leading to the formation of life.

Speaker Biography
Dr. Widicus Weaver received her B.S. in Chemistry from Illinois Wesleyan University in 2000 and her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 2005. She was then a postdoctoral scholar in the departments of Chemistry and Astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She joined the faculty at Emory in June, 2008.