CP-2156 Life In The Universe
Figure 5. Typical dark, dense, and
dusty interstellar clouds can be seen outside the glowing Trifid
Nebula. The contours show the distribution of several molecules
within a particularly rich cloud known as M20SW (left top frame,
photograph from Harvard Observatory, contours from author's
research). Nearly a dozen interstellar molecules having masses
greater than 50 atomic mass units had been observed by mid-1979 in
the interstellar clouds of our Galaxy (right top frame). The unique
hyperfine spectral features of the HC5N molecule were
observed at 8 Ghz toward an interstellar cloud with the 1000-channel
spectrometer of the Haystack Observatory (bottom frame, unpublished
data by author and his associates).
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