Molecules circumstellar shells

In 1985. similar experiments were conducted at Rice University. In a 1988 paper. Curl and Smalley (Rice University) outlined their experiments with carbon cluster beams, essentially using the clusler-generaung apparatus previously described by the Exxon researchers. Initially, this experimentation was motivated by an interest that had been shown by die astrophysicist, Krotu (University of Sussex), who had been modeling the formation of carbon molecules in circumstellar shells. As a consequence, the Rice University team concentrated its studies on the smaller (2- to 30-atom) carbon clusters. As pointed out in the Curl-Smalley paper, the objective was to determine if some or all of the species had the same form as the long linear carbon chains known to be abundant in interstellar space."... 

Linear hydrocarbon radicals have been the subject of intensive laboratory spectroscopic and radio-astronomical research since the early 1980s. In recent years, a considerable number of rotational spectroscopic studies of medium to longer hydrocarbon chains such as C5H, CeH, CgH, and ChH have been carried out using a pulsed molecular beam FTMW spectrometer. The high resolution offered by such a spectrometer allowed the detection of the hyperfine sphtting of rotational transitions. These measurements improved fine and hyperfine coupling constants and provided rest frequencies with accuracies better than 0.30 km s in equivalent radial velocity up to 50 GHz. Indeed, some of the small C H radicals with n < 9 have subsequently been detected in space, in molecular cloud cores, and in certain circumstellar shells. These hydrocarbon chains are among the most abundant reactive space molecules known. 

Kroto HW, Heat JR, O Brien SC, Curl RF, Smalley RE. Long carbon chain molecules in circumstellar shells. Astrophys. J. 1987, 314, 352. 

It has been suggested that free polycyllc aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) molecules can account for unidentified Interstellar emission features In the infrared (8) and for the diffuse Interstellar absorption bands In the visible (9), Also, the possibility of the Interstellar and circumstellar presence of hollow, cage-llke polycarbon molecules with spheroidal shells of hexagonal, graphlte-like sheets of carbon atoms has... 

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