A possible explanation has been discovered for the UV peak at 2175A based on the presence of fullerenes and buckyonians in interstellar matter. This is a problem that has been known about in astrophysics for over fifty years.
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It is well known that fullerenes – big, complex, and highly resistant carbon molecules with potential applications in nanotechnology – are mostly seen in planetary nebulae (PNe); old dying stars with progenitor masses similar to our Sun. Fullerenes, like C60 and C70, have been detected in PNe whose infrared (IR) spectra are dominated by broad unidentified IR (UIR) plateau emissions. The identification of the chemical species (structure and composition) responsible for such UIR emission widely present in the Universe is a mystery in astrochemistry; although they are believed to be carbon-rich
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H II regions are ionized nebulae associated with the formation of massive stars. They exhibit a wealth of emission lines in their spectra that form the basis for estimation of chemical composition. The amount of heavy chemical elements is essential to the understanding of important phenomena such as nucleosynthesis, star formation and chemical evolution of galaxies. For over 80 years, however, a discrepancy exists of a factor of around two between heavy-element abundances (the so-called metallicity) derived from the two main kinds of emission lines that can be measured in nebular spectra
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CaII Kgrains, i.e., intermittent, short-lived (about 1 minute), periodic (2-4 minutes), pointlike chromospheric brightenings, are considered to be the manifestations of acoustic waves propagating upward from the solar surface and developing into shocks in the chromosphere. After the simulations of Carlsson and Stein, we know that hot shocked gas moving upward interacting with the downflowing chromospheric gas (falling down after having been displaced upward by a previous shock) nicely reproduces the spectral features of the CaII K profiles observed in such grains, i.e., a narrowband emission
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