Bioast07: Untangling the 'confusion limit'

Astronomers at the University of Arizona are conducting a "deep" survey of one of the strongest sources in the galactic sky - Sagittarius B2N - to try to get a handle on which organic species have been detected in space. D. Halfen of the Univ. of Arizona reported at the conference about recent millimeter-wave work that he and his colleagues have been doing to make progress on identifying new features that are so weakly present that they are just above the noise limit of the detectors. Further complicating this are the forest of emission lines from other dominant species such as methanol. They unveiled a plan to make a detailed accounting for the most abundant species, removing those features from an astronomical spectrum and identifying what new features remain, especially ones important to prebiotic chemistry.