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Project Summary

Ices and organics in the molecular clouds are subjected to a plethora of harsh conditions such as thermal, ultraviolet- (UV), and particle-irradiation that destroy, sputter or modify the material. As a result, it is likely that the molecular compounds found in the initial cloud and those observed in circumstellar disks may not, at first glance, be very similar but instead are linked via complex chemical networks. the Sun formed in a high mass star-forming cloud where at least one, and most likely many, supernova events occurred, resulting in intense UV radiation throughout the cloud complex. The Rosette molecular cloud provides the perfect laboratory analog for the early solar nebula molecular cloud. This project is a comparative study of the UV processing of the ices toward several embedded stellar clusters in the Rosette molecular cloud.