The Formation of HCS and HCSH Molecules and Their Role in the Collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter
R. I. Kaiser,
*
C. Ochsenfeld,
M. Head-Gordon,
Y. T. Lee
The reaction of hydrogen sulfide with ground-state atomic carbon
was examined with crossed molecular beams experiments and ab initio
calculations. The thiohydroxycarbene molecule, HCSH, was the reactive
intermediate, which fragmented into atomic hydrogen and the thioformyl
radical HCS. This finding may account for the unassigned HCS source and
an unidentified HCSH radical needed to match observed CS abundances
from the collision of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter. In the
shocked jovian atmosphere, HCS could further decompose to H and CS, and
CS could react with SH and OH to yield the observed CS2 and
COS.
Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley and
Chemical Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
*
Present address: Academia Sinica, Institute of Atomic and
Molecular Sciences, 1, Section 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei, 116, Taiwan, Republic of China, and Department of Physics, Technical University Chemnitz-Zwickau, 09107 Chemnitz, Germany.
Present address: Academia Sinica, Institute of Atomic and
Molecular Sciences, 1, Section 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei, 116, Taiwan, Republic of China.
