2001ApJ...554..126B

One of the major criticisms of identifying the infrared emission bands with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) molecules has been the lack of a match between laboratory spectra of individual PAHs and the emission features. Part of the difficulty arises from the complexity of modeling the emission mechanism with an a priori unknown mixture of ionized and neutral PAHs. A direct comparison between laboratory spectra of PAHs and astronomical sources is possible for absorption spectra. However, because of poor atmospheric transmission, ground-based spectra of the PAH absorption band in the C-H stretch region are too noisy to make a detailed comparison with laboratory spectra. In this paper we show that ISO Short Wavelength Spectrometer spectra of a few protostars that show a 3.25 µm absorption band can be well matched by laboratory absorption spectra of a mixture of isolated PAHs.