Astrosurf

Event Reports...

The Astrophysical Chemistry Group of the RSC & RAS organised the meeting entitled "The Chemistry of Planets and Where they Come From", at the Department of Physics, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland on Thursday 5th and Friday 6th January 2006. Bursaries were awarded to;

• • Martin Andrews, UCL

    Martin Andrews, UCL

    The opportunity to present my research at the Chemistry of the Planets meeting, organised by Dr Helen Fraser at the University of Strathclyde was very welcome. The presentation, entitled 'The impact of planet migration on planetesimals in the terrestrial zone' describes the necessity of planet migration in extrasolar systems with 'hot'-planets orbiting close to their parent star. If migrating protoplanets remove all planetesimals in the terrestrial zone then no material remains from which to form terrestrial planets. However, if the planetesimals survive in situ then the possibility remains for terrestrial planets to form after migration has occurred. Results from computer simulations demonstrate that around half of the planetesimals survived in the inner system despite the migrating protoplanet. Thus terrestrial-sized planets may exist in extrasolar systems containing 'hot' planets. The benefit to my studies of presenting at the meeting are numerous. PhD students have few opportunities during their studies to present their work to inter-university audiences. The questions raised during the presentation and the subsequent discussions provide valuable pointers to future directions and possible collaborations. Other considerations were raised, which aids an appreciation of the wider aspects of planet formation and disc chemistry to my ongoing work.

• • John Thrower, University of Nottingham

    John Thrower, University of Nottingham

    I attended the above meeting and made a poster presentation entitled “Adsorption of CO on Meteorite Nanoparticles”, covering our recent work at Nottingham. As a first year PhD student, attending the meeting was extremely useful in allowing me to gain an insight into the wider field of astrochemistry. In particular, the oral presentations and posters presented during the meeting covered many aspects of the field with which I was not familiar. The meeting also allowed me to meet many of the key researchers in astrochemistry and learn about their research areas.
    
    Producing and presenting a poster on our recent research was a particularly useful experience. It allowed me to pull together the work we have been focussing on and present it in such a way that would make it both accessible and interesting to researchers in many areas of astrochemistry. I am certain that this experience has helped me to improve my skills in presenting research, which will be useful in the future.
    
    Finally, I would like to thank Astrosurf and SUPA for providing the bursaries. Given the distance travelled and the overnight stay required, this certainly helped to reduce the financial burden and make it easier for me to attend.

• • Richard Court, Aberdeen University

    Richard Court, Aberdeen University

    I gave a presentation regarding the astrobiological significance of thermally degraded HCN polymer.
    
    HCN, a compound fairly abundant in extraterrestrial environments, polymerises readily upon exposure to a range of energy sources, including ionising radiation, forming a brown-black solid. This material is prone to hydrolysis, reacting to form various astrobiologically interesting compounds, including amino acids and nucleobases. Consequently, delivery of HCN polymers to the surface of this planet may have been of great significance to the origin of life.
    
    However, delivery of extraterrestrial material to a planetary surface can be a violent process. It is not clear whether thermally degraded HCN polymer can still produce astrobiologically interesting species? My analyses suggest that HCN polymer exposed to 300 °C air for 30 minutes retains the ability to produce, upon hydrolysis, amino acids and nucleobases. Further work is required to determine the efficiency of production and to improve this crude simulation.
    
    I received valuable feedback regarding many areas of this investigation, such as the analytical procedures and directions of future research, and listened to many interesting presentations from other researchers. I expect that the contacts made at the meeting will be of great use in the future.

• • Becky Enoch, Open University

    Becky Enoch, Open University

    I recently attended the 2-day meeting on the chemistry of planets at Strathclyde University. I found the subjects covered in the talks and on the posters very useful. These ranged from topics I was fairly familiar with, such as exoplanet detection, through topics I had heard of and was interested to know more about, being relevant to my research, such as the role of H₃⁺ in planetary atmospheres and the effects of planetary migration on planet formation in the Habitable Zone, to topics that were new to me such as the chemistry of disks. I feel the various talks helped expand my knowledge of topics centred on, and peripheral to, my PhD research, and introduced me to connected themes. My poster presentation on ‘SuperWASP: the Search for Transiting Exoplanets’, detailing the SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) project and its achievements to date, prompted several useful discussions with other PhD students and more experienced researchers about exoplanet research, during the coffee and lunch breaks in the poster rooms.

• • Kelly Gannon, University of Leeds

    Kelly Gannon, University of Leeds

    My PhD work is predominantly gas kinetic studies of reactions relevant to the atmosphere of Titan. Having never attended a conference dedicated to planetary systems, I found it both very interesting and informative to learn of the other work currently being undertaken related directly to what I am doing, but also found it useful to learn of new techniques and studies of other systems I may be interested to work on in the future.
    
    I found the presentations given by both Coralie Berteloite and Odile Dutuit focused on Titan and the Cassini Huygen’s mission most helpful as these gave me an insight into the work being undertaken alongside mine and guidance as to future reactions which it would be most useful to study.
    
    Presenting my poster entitled “H Atom Branching Ratios Of Reactions Of CN Plus Selected Olefins” gave me a great opportunity to discuss my work with others who were able to shed light on problems I had encountered and also give advice as to future work. Having only ever presented one poster before, this helped improve my confidence and also I gained many contacts to whom I can now correspond regarding my work.
    
    Overall I enjoyed and learnt a lot from attending this conference as there was much varied content.

• • Stephen Otter, Open University

    Stephen Otter, Open University

    As a first year PhD student the RSC and RAS ‘Chemistry of Planets’ meeting was my first proper conference and I found it to be an excellent introduction to this aspect of academic life. The conference was well organised with an exciting and diverse range of topics and speakers within the meeting’s sphere of interest. My own research interests centre on the planet Mars and in particular interactions between the Martian surface and atmosphere so I found the talks by Dr Lidija Siller and Dr Anita Dawes to be of specific relevance. Of no less interest were the talks covering exo-planet formation and detection techniques, and I particularly enjoyed the introductory lecture by Dr Greaves. The poster sessions during the tea and lunch breaks provided an excellent opportunity to meet the people from different institutions who are involved in the same area of research as me, especially the fellow students who reassured me that starting a PhD is just as scary for everyone else too. All in all this was great new experience and a chance to find out what’s going on in my area of research from the very people who share that interest. The chance to visit a new city and sample the local whisky was just an added bonus.

• • Claire Rickets, UCL

    Claire Rickets, UCL

    The meeting was excellent. All the talks were very interesting and at a very high standard. As a final year PhD student this meeting was a good opportunity for me to improve my background knowledge of the chemistry of planets. I am researching the reactions of doubly charged ions with neutrals – generally probing the reactivity, concentrating on the reaction mechanisms of the bond forming reactions. Although initially these reactions were assumed only to be of fundamental interest, recent research has shown dications are a relatively common feature of planetary atmospheres. I am very interested in the field of astrochemistry, however because my work is relatively new to the field of planetary chemistry I have not had the chance to go to a meeting related to the chemistry of planets before so it was great to have the opportunity to hear talks, see posters and meet people working in the field.

• • Julia Roberts, UCL

    Julia Roberts, UCL

    As a first year PhD student I was unfortunately available to present a poster for this meeting. At the moment I am studying chemical models of collapsing molecular clouds, and in particular I am looking at the desorption of chemical species from dust grains. Several of the talks at the meeting were of particular relevance to my studies, especially Dr Mark Collings's talk on 'Probing the Morphology of Interstellar Ices', where the banded desorption of CO from water and methane ices described will have to be considered in my model. Other talks helped to give me a broader understanding of the chemistry involved in astronomy, such as 'The Chemistry of Disks' by David Williams, and I enjoyed listening to the talks on exo-planets.
    
    The posters were also very informative, and it was interesting to speak to some of the people who perform the experiments to calculate data such as rate coefficients and branching ratios, as I will need to use similar data in my model.

• • Sally Taylor, University of Leeds

    Sally Taylor, University of Leeds

    The conference was very useful as it allowed me to gain a greater understanding of the chemistry and the processes occurring in the atmospheres of other planets and within the disks in which planets form. The Plenary lectures were very good and provided a very good background to the lectures within their section; I especially enjoyed the talks given by Jane Greaves and Keith Horne. My research focuses on the study of the kinetics of reactions occurring within planetary atmospheres, so the talks given by Coralie Berteloite (Low temperature kinetics of reactions involving C4H relevant to Titan’s atmosphere) and by Odile Dutuit (Laboratory studies relevant for the chemistry of Titan’s ionosphere) were very interesting for me. Even though not all the talks directly applied to the research I am doing I found them all very interesting – all the speakers were very good - and they provided me with a good background in their subjects.
    
    The conference also allowed me to present my poster, entitled ‘A pulsed Laval nozzle for the study of kinetics at very low temperatures’, and I was able to discuss my work with others and pick up some lots of useful ideas and information.