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seriousnotshirley t1_je20uni wrote

Reply to comment by adamginsburg in Is NaCl relatively common in the galaxy/universe? by PHealthy

For some reason I thought HEXOS had identified NaCL in Orion about 15 years ago but it looks like it's not coming up.

I'm curious what the temps were for NaCl close to stars and what the spectra looks like. I can't imagine identifying anything at higher temps.

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adamginsburg t1_je21h3n wrote

Huh, I hadn't heard of that, but that's super interesting if so. I don't see any mention of NaCl in https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014ApJ...787..112C/abstract or the other HEXOS papers, but I'm just doing a ctrl-f, so it's possible I missed it (if they specified the isotopologue, for example)

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seriousnotshirley t1_je2h9rb wrote

It was 15 years ago so I probably mis-remembered it. My chem professor did a lot of rotational spectroscopy and had invited someone from HEXOS to give a presentation.

I know the stuff I looked at at room temp looked like a bunch of noise. I tried writing some algorithms to help fix parameters of the molecule to match observed spectra and it went badly above something like 50 K. I'm surprised you were able to pick out transitions near a star! Nice work.

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