Spectroscopic study and astronomical detection of doubly 13C-substituted ethyl cyanide

TL;DR

This study combines laboratory spectroscopy and ALMA observations to detect and analyze doubly 13C-substituted isotopologues of ethyl cyanide in space, providing precise spectroscopic data and confirming their presence in the interstellar medium.

Contribution

It provides the first unambiguous detection of doubly 13C-substituted ethyl cyanide isotopologues in space with accurate spectroscopic parameters and laboratory data.

Findings

Doubly 13C-substituted ethyl cyanide isotopologues are detected in Sgr B2(N2).

Laboratory spectra cover 150-990 GHz with over 5000 transitions per isotopologue.

The 12C/13C ratio for these isotopologues is approximately 25.

Abstract

We have performed a spectral line survey called EMoCA toward Sagittarius B2(N) between 84 and 114 GHz with ALMA. Line intensities of the main isotopic species of ethyl cyanide and its singly 13C-substituted isotopomers observed toward the hot molecular core Sgr B2(N2) suggest that the doubly 13C-substituted isotopomers should be detectable also. We want to determine the spectroscopic parameters of all three doubly 13C-substituted isotopologues of ethyl cyanide to search for them in our ALMA data. We investigated the laboratory rotational spectra of the three species between 150 and 990 GHz. We searched for emission lines produced by these species in the ALMA spectrum of Sgr B2(N2). We modeled their emission as well as the emission of the 12C and singly 13C-substituted isotopologues assuming local thermodynamic equilibrium. We identified more than 5000 rotational transitions, pertaining to more than 3500 different transition frequencies, in the laboratory for each of the three isotopomers. The quantum numbers reach J ~ 115 and K_a ~ 35, resulting in accurate spectroscopic parameters and accurate rest frequency calculations beyond 1000 GHz for strong to moderately weak transitions of either isotopomer. All three species are unambiguously detected in our ALMA data. The 12C/13C column density ratio of the isotopomers with one 13C atom to the ones with two 13C atoms is about 25. Ethyl cyanide is the second molecule after methyl cyanide for which isotopologues containing two 13C atoms have been securely detected in the interstellar medium. The model of our ethyl cyanide data suggests that we should be able to detect vibrational satellites of the main species up to at least v_19 = 1 at 1130 K and up to v_13 + v_21 = 2 at 600 K for the isotopologues with one 13C atom in our present ALMA data. Such satellites may be too weak to be identified unambiguously for isotopologues with two 13C atoms.