The Search for Pyruvic Acid in Molecule-Rich Interstellar Sources

Abstract:

Pyruvic acid is known to be involved in biological functions, such as the Krebs cycle, as well as being a potential precursor for the amino acid alanine in the interstellar medium (ISM). It is therefore an important candidate for interstellar searches but has yet to be detected in the ISM due to lack of submillimeter spectroscopic information. The spectrum of pyruvic acid was collected and assigned up to 1 THz and the resultant fit and prediction can now be used as a guide to search for pyruvic acid in the ISM. Observations of various interstellar sources were collected by the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO). Using the Global Optimization and Broadband Analysis Software for Interstellar Chemistry (GOBASIC)2 written in the Matlab coding language, the work presented here attempts to take the previously fit results from a set of observational spectral line surveys of molecule-rich sources1 and additionally searches for matches to the millimeter/sub-millimeter wave spectrum of pyruvic acid. Unfortunately, no definitive detections of pyruvic acid were made, however, an upper limit analysis based on previous results3 was performed on all sources. The results of these searches, the upper-limit analyses, and the implications for future studies of pyruvic acid in the ISM are presented here. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation’s REU program in Astrophysics through NSF award AST-1852136.