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creepywhiteguys:

…. and thanks to that last sentence, one of my favorite restaurants is now ruined for me.  It’s one thing to indulge your racial arrogance, but when you ruin one of my favorite places to dine, that’s when I give in to pure, unadulterated RAGE

Did it ever occur to you that perhaps some of these solicitations were from sex dealers/traffickers?  Their diction and phrasing is unusual. 

*Deciphering the chemistry of the universe with the ALMA telescope*
Published on EarthSky|
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Combining the cutting-edge capabilities of the ALMA telescope with
newly-developed laboratory techniques, scientists are opening a completely
new era for deciphering the chemistry of the Universe. A research team
demonstrated their breakthrough using ALMA data from observations of the
gas in a star-forming region in the constellation Orion.

Using new technology both at the telescope and in the laboratory, the
scientists were able to greatly improve and speed the process of
identifying the “fingerprints” of chemicals in the cosmos, enabling studies
that until now would have been either impossible or prohibitively
time-consuming.

“We’ve shown that, with ALMA, we’re going to be able to do real chemical
analysis of the gaseous ‘nurseries’ where new stars and planets are
forming, unrestricted by many of the limitations we’ve had in the past,”
said Anthony Remijan of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in
Charlottesville, VA.

ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, is under
construction on the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, at an elevation of
16,500 feet. When completed in 2013, its 66 high-precision antennas and
advanced electronics will provide scientists with unprecedented
capabilities to explore the Universe as seen at wavelengths between
longer-wavelength radio and infrared.

Those wavelengths are particularly rich in clues about the presence of
specific molecules in the cosmos. More than 170 molecules, including
organic molecules such as sugars and alcohols, have been discovered in
space. Such chemicals are common in the giant clouds of gas and dust in
which new stars and planets are forming. “We know that many of the chemical
precursors to life exist in these stellar nurseries even before the planets
form,” said Thomas Wilson of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington,
D.C.

Molecules in space rotate and vibrate, and each molecule has a particular
set of rotational and vibrational conditions that are possible for it. Each
time a molecule changes from one such condition to another, a specific
amount of energy is either absorbed or emitted, often as radio waves at
very specific wavelengths. Each molecule has a unique pattern of
wavelengths that it emits or absorbs, and that pattern serves as a telltale
“fingerprint” identifying the molecule.

The breakthrough comes because of new technology that allows scientists to
gather and analyze a broad swath of wavelengths at once, both with ALMA and
in the laboratory.
[image: test]

VIEW LARGER |
Plot of radio emission at numerous frequencies from the molecule ethyl
cyanide (CH3CH2CN). Blue is the plot from terrestrial laboratory
measurement; red is the plot from ALMA observation of a star-forming region
in the constellation Orion. The ability to do this type of matching
represents a major breakthrough for studying the chemistry of the Universe.
Plots are superimposed on Hubble Space Telescope image of the Orion Nebula;
small box indicates location of area observed with ALMA. Image Credit:
Fortman, et al., NRAO/AUI/NSF, NASA.

“We now can take a sample of a chemical, test it in the laboratory, and get
a plot of all its characteristic lines over a large range of wavelengths.
We get the whole picture at once,” said Frank DeLucia of the Ohio State
University (OSU). “We can then model the characteristics of all the lines
of a chemical at different temperatures,” he added.

Armed with new OSU laboratory data for a few suspected molecules, the
scientists then compared the patterns with those produced by observing the
star-forming region with ALMA.

“The matchup was amazing,” said Sarah Fortman, also from OSU. “Spectral
lines that had been unidentified for years suddenly matched our laboratory
data, verified the existence of specific molecules, and gave us a new tool
to attack the complex spectra from regions in our Galaxy,” she added. The
first tests were done with ethyl cyanide (CH3CH2CN) because its existence
in space was already well established and thus it provided a perfect test
for this new method of analysis.

“In the past, there were so many unidentified lines that we called them
‘weeds,’ and they only confused our analysis. Now those ‘weeds’ are
valuable clues that can tell us not only what chemicals are present in
these cosmic gas clouds, but also can give important information about the
conditions in those clouds,” DeLucia said.

“This is a new era in astrochemistry,” said Suzanna Randall of ESO
Headquarters in Garching, Germany. “These new techniques are going to
revolutionize our understanding of the fascinating nurseries where new
stars and planets are being born.”

The new techniques, Remijan pointed out, also can be adapted to other
telescopes, including the National Science Foundation’s giant Green Bank
Telescope in West Virginia, and laboratory facilities such as those at the
University of Virginia. “This is going to change the way astrochemists do
business,” Remijan said.

*Via National Radio Astronomy
Observatory>
*

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