New data!

Howdy! So this past week Dr. Hassel and I have been dealing with a little problem: The Siena High Performance Computing Cluster was down for a while! The cluster, which allows us to run complex calculations at times that would be impossible for a single computer or even for a few computers, was not working for a small amount of time but we just had to wait for it to get back up and running again! Once it started to work again, all was well and we were able to run some brand new simulations. In this blog post, I will show a few different graphs that we were able to produce and explain their importance! The first pair of graphs that I will show pertains to H2. Each of the molecules I will illustrate has two phases: the gas and ice phase. Since we are simulating the likelihood that these elements will form on a dust grain particle, we have to take into account that likelihood in both the gas and ice phases of its stellar evolution. I will be presenting 20 separate graphs in my presentation on April 1st! The molecules that are directly affected by the change in the binding energies are: O2, H2, N2, CH4, and CO. Then we have molecules that are only indirectly changed by the binding energy differences, which are H2O and NH3. Some of these molecules are affected greatly by the new binding energies and some are not affected in both the gas and solid phases, but each of these molecules are affected in at least one phase. HCOOH, NH2OH, and NH2CHO are the biomolecules that we also examined through our codes, which can provide more access into amino acid precursor formation in the earliest rungs of the space time continuum.

Thanks for reading this post and my next post (hopefully) will be all about the Rochester symposium!

Recently....

Hey guys! So recently myself and Dr. Hassel have been doing a lot of cool stuff and getting a lot of things in order for the upcoming research symposium at the University of Rochester on April 1! With my abstract submitted and my presentation coming along, it should shape up to be a very exciting weekend! I'm super excited for it and I have only presented research in this manner once so hopefully it all goes well! But that's enough with the future (we will get back to that later), what is really cool is the present! So for the past few weeks Dr. Hassel and I have been working hard to get more results on the latest and newest batch of results from the aforementioned Dr. Vidali at Syracuse. A few weeks ago I moved all of Dr. Vidali's findings into my AdvancedLabProject folder so that I could run through all of the data set myself and determine the percent difference and raw difference of certain elements between the two trials. With this, we will more accurately be able to determine the percent difference of amino acid precursor elements between the 2014 results of Dr. Vidali and our own 2017 findings.

One theoretical approximation that we use to calculate these abundances is an experiment form 1952 called the Miller-Urey experiment, which essentially aimed to recreate the chemical compositions of early Earth that allowed human life to take place. This is a cornerstone of understanding how some biomolecules, like amino acids, could form non-biologically here on Earth. Here are two links if you would like to explore this fascinating and groundbreaking experiment even further: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment and https://ncse.com/files/pub/creationism/icons/gishlick_icons1.pdf . Another idea that this experiment hearkens to is Charles Darwin's "Warm Little Pond" suggestion, in writing to his friend Joseph Hooker in 1781, that all life on Earth is intrinsically connected. Darwin theorizes that all protein compounds that created life, and thus all people, might have just been able to form from one original point of life. While this is not necessarily the research that I am conducting, it is interesting to think of the implications of expanding knowledge into certain fields and how great minds of times past have been pondering similar questions centuries and millennia before. (Also, an unrelated fun fact: Over spring break I went to a bookstore that had in its possession a super old and $5,000 (YES!) version of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, so naturally I picked it up and then by accident I creased one of its thin yet superbly well preserved pages almost embarrassingly far. I had to walk out of the store as if I had done nothing wrong and I will not state the location of said bookstore as to avoid both God's wrath and potential property damage litigation.)

What is special about Dr. Vidali's old 2014 results is that we were able to see how a cold cloud was able to enhance the number of suspected atoms of formic acid (CH2O2) and hydroxylamine (H3NO), both of which are seen as important precursors to biomolecules in space. With the new 2017 binding energies produced, we are hoping to get an answer to the question of whether anything else is changing at a pace like formic acid or hydroxylamine? Also to come is hopefully the answer of whether increasing the temperatures of these reactions will change the rates at which these potential biomolecules can be produced? And if temperature does change these biomolecules, what temperatures would be most conducive to producing the highest amount of formic acid and hydroxylamine?

Thanks for reading!