Organic Molecules in Space: Insights from the NASA Ames Molecular Database in the era of the James Webb Space Telescope
Matthew J. Shannon
Christiaan Boersma
We present the software tool pyPAHdb to the scientific astronomical
community, which is used to characterize emission from one of the
most prevalent types of organic molecules in space, namely
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). It leverages the detailed
studies of organic molecules done at the NASA Ames Research
Center. pyPAHdb is a streamlined Python version of the NASA Ames
PAH IR Spectroscopic Database (PAHdb; www.astrochemistry.org/pahdb) suite of IDL tools. PAHdb
has been extensively used to analyze and interpret the PAH
signature from a plethora of emission sources, ranging from
solar-system objects to entire galaxies. pyPAHdb decomposes
astronomical PAH emission spectra into contributing PAH sub-classes
in terms of charge and size using a database-fitting technique. The
inputs for the fit are spectra constructed using the spectroscopic
libraries of PAHdb and take into account the detailed photo-physics
of the PAH excitation/emission process.
astronomy, databases, fitting, data analysis
DOI10.25080/Majora-4af1f417-00f