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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Astron. Space Sci.
Sec. Astrochemistry
Volume 11 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fspas.2024.1466975
This article is part of the Research Topic Chemical Diversity of Circumstellar Envelopes Around Evolved Stars View all 3 articles

Alternate Formation of AlOH from Third Row Diatomic Hydrides and Oxides

Provisionally accepted
Rebecca A. Firth Rebecca A. Firth Ryan C. Fortenberry Ryan C. Fortenberry *
  • University of Mississippi, Oxford, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    One of the most abundant Al-containing molecules detected in the interstellar medium (ISM) is AlOH. Over the past several years, there have been various pathways proposed for the formation of AlOH in the ISM, including reactions between AlO and H 2 or H 2 O. However, these pathways include an energetic barrier from a transition state that likely prevents the reaction from progressing efficiently in the low temperature/low pressure environment of the ISM. Recently, a barrierless pathway for formation of AlOH from AlO and AlH has been proposed for the formation of AlOH. Even so, only one of these species really needs to contain an aluminum atom. To account for this, alternative but related pathways reacting the known interstellar molecule AlO with XH and AlH with XO (X = Mg, Si, P, or S) to form AlOH are explored with high accuracy quantum chemical calculations via CCSD(T)-F12b/cc-pVTZ-F12. Each third row element has at least one pair of reactants that lead to exothermic formation of AlOH. These reactions can go on to form other aluminum oxides and aluminum oxide clusters that may, in part, lead to the formation of interstellar dust grains.

    Keywords: reaction pathways, Submerged barriers, Aluminum chemistry, Third Row Chemistry, Diatomic Reactants, coupled cluster theory

    Received: 18 Jul 2024; Accepted: 09 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Firth and Fortenberry. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Ryan C. Fortenberry, University of Mississippi, Oxford, United States

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