Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 1,759

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 82 of the 82 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Complex Organic Interstellar Molecules

Herbst, Eric, van Dishoeck, Ewine F.·2009·Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics

Abstract

Of the over 150 different molecular species detected in the interstellar and circumstellar media, approximately 50 contain 6 or more atoms. These molecules, labeled complex by astronomers if not by chemists, all contain the element carbon and so can be called organic. In the interstellar medium, complex molecules are detected in the denser sources only. Although, with one exception, complex molecules have only been detected in the gas phase, there is strong evidence that they can be formed in ice mantles on interstellar grains. The nature of the gaseous complex species depends dramatically on the source where they are found: in cold, dense regions they tend to be unsaturated (hydrogen-poor) and exotic, whereas in young stellar objects, they tend to be quite saturated (hydrogen-rich) and terrestrial in nature. Based on both their spectra and chemistry, complex molecules are excellent probes of the physical conditions and history of the sources where they reside. Because they are detected in young stellar objects, complex molecules are expected to be common ingredients for new planetary systems. In this review, we discuss both the observation and chemistry of complex molecules in assorted interstellar regions in the Milky Way.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1146/annurev-astro-082708-101654

Cites

82 of 82 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 82 references

Cited by

See all 1,759

Metadata

Authors
Herbst, E., & van Dishoeck, E. F.
Venue
Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Published
2009-09-01
Volume
47
Issue
1
Pages
427-480
ISSN
  • 0066-4146 (ISSN-L)
  • 1545-4282
OpenAlex
W2170292914
Cited by
1,759
References
82
FWCI
3.03
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Complex Organic Interstellar Molecules. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1146/annurev-astro-082708-101654
The paper
Herbst, E., & van Dishoeck, E. F. (2009). Complex Organic Interstellar Molecules. Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-astro-082708-101654

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.