PhotoDissociation Regions (PDRs) encompass all the interstellar regions where gas is predominantly neutral (e.g. gas that lies in the border outside HII regions) but where Far-UV photons (6 eV < hν <13.6 eV) play an important role on their structure, chemistry, and thermal balance. All of the atomic and most of the molecular gas in our Galaxy is in PDRs.

First models on PDRs were developed 30 years ago. The Asilomar Conference on 30 Years of PhotoDissociation Regions (Asilomar, USA, June 28 – July 3, 2015) will spread our knowledge about the governing processes in these regions and the role they play in the regulation of star-formation processes.

Javier R. Goicoechea (ICMM-CSIC), Asunción Fuente (OAN-IGN) and Olivier Berné (IRAP-CNRS) will talk about the Chemistry of PDRs, the Spitzer & Herschel observations of galactic PDRs, and the role of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in PDRs, respectively.

Stay tuned¡¡¡

NANOCOSMOS is highlighted at the “In Focus” section of the Leiden Observatory AstroPAH newsletter (The Netherlands). AstroPAH is focused on research about Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) in astronomical environments. NANOCOSMOS will try to shed light on the formation of these species, which is poorly understood. In the article, a brief presentation of the project is presented with the main scientific goals, the Stardust machine (cover image on the left) that will be devoted to produce and analyze in-situ highly-controlled analogs of the dust grains in a versatile ultra-high-vacuum experiment and other experimental set-ups to analyze the molecular content of the nanoparticles that will be produced in the different simulation chambers.