V.B.4.e.1. How Complete are Astrophysical Catalogs?
We have previously asked the question, “How complete are astrophysical catalogs?” and have answered this question experimentally by as shown in Fig. V.B.4.b-1 sorting both synthetic spectra based on the QM catalogs and experimental spectra according to intensity [1]. We have calculated and shown in Fig. V.B.4.b-2 the location of this point as a function of temperature for a number of species. At the 190 K used in this paper for the simulations of ethyl cyanide, vinyl cyanide, and methyl cyanide, these correspond to factors of approximately 0.2, 0.07, and 0.005 respectively.
While these are interesting results, they do not directly address the astrophysically interesting question, “How many uncataloged lines are there in a particular astrophysical spectra?” The answer to this question is also a function of telescope and astrophysical source parameters (the temperature of the source, the abundance of the species in the source, and noise floor of the telescope). These data from ALMA allow us to address this question.
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