NASA NTRS1998
The importance of reactions at the surfaces of dust grains has long been recognized to be one of the two main chemical processes that form molecules in cold, dark interstellar clouds where simple, saturated (fully-hydrogenated) molecules such as H2 water, methanol, H2CO, H2S, ammonia and CH4 are present in quantities far too high to be consistent with their extremely low gas phase formation rates. In cold dark regions of interstellar space, dust grains provide a substrate onto which gas-phase species can accrete and react. Grains provide a "third body" or a sink for the energy released in the exothermic reactions that form chemical bonds. In essence, the surfaces of dust grains open up alternative reaction pathways to form observed molecules whose abundances cannot be explained with gas-phase chemistry alone. This concept is taken one step further in this work: instead of merely acting as a substrate onto which radicals and molecules may physically adsorb, some grains may actively participate in the reaction itself, forming chemical bonds with the accreting species. Until recently, surface chemical reactions had not been thought to be important in warm circumstellar media because adspecies rapidly desorb from grains at very low temperatures; thus, the residence times of molecules and radicals on the surface of grains at all but the lowest temperatures are far too short to allow these reactions to occur. However, if the adspecies could adsorb more strongly, via a true chemical bond with surfaces of some dust grains, then grain surface reactions will play an important role in warm circumstellar regions as well. In this work, the surface-catalyzed reaction CO + 3 H2 yields CH4 + H2O is studied in the context that it may be very effective at converting the inorganic molecule CO into the simplest organic compound, methane. H2 and CO are the most abundant molecules in space, and the reaction converting them to methane, while kinetically inhibited in the gas phase under most astrophysical conditions, is catalyzed by iron, an abundant constituent of interstellar dust. At temperatures between 600 and 1000 K, which occur in the outflows from red giants and near luminous young stars, this reaction readily proceeds in the presence of an iron catalyst. Iron is one of the more abundant elements composing interstellar dust. Its abundance relative to hydrogen is almost that of silicon, and both of these heavy elements are primarily locked up in dust at all but the hottest regions of interstellar space.