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Despite its potential reactivity due to ring strain, ethylene oxide (c-C2H4O) is a complex molecule that seems to be stable under the physical conditions of an interstellar dense core; indeed it has been detected towards several high-mass star forming regions with a column density of the order of 10e13cm-2 (Ikeda et al. 2001). To date, its observational abundances cannot be reproduced by chemical models and this may be due to the significant contribution played by its chemistry on grain surfaces. Recently, Ward and Price (2011) have performed experiments in order to investigate the surface formation of ethylene oxide starting with oxygen atoms and ethylene ice as reactants. We present a chemical model which includes the most recent experimental results from Ward and Price (2011) on the formation of c-C2H4O. We study the influence of the physical parameters of dense cores on the abundances of c-C2H4O. We verify that ethylene oxide can indeed be formed during the cold phase (when the ISM dense cores are formed), via addition of an oxygen atom across the C=C double bond of the ethylene molecule, and released by thermal desorption during the hot core phase. A qualitative comparison between our theoretical results and those from the observations shows that we are able to reproduce the abundances of ethylene oxide towards high-mass star-forming regions.

The heterogeneous thermal reaction between carbon disulphide (CS2) and oxygen (O) atoms, producing carbonyl sulphide (OCS), has been investigated under astrophysically relevant conditions in laboratory experiments. We study this reaction at a range of fixed surface temperatures between 15 and 70 K. Following the interaction of the reactants, on a highly oriented pyrolytic graphite surface at a particular surface temperature, we use temperature-programmed desorption coupled with time-of-flight mass spectrometry to determine the yield of OCS. Consequently, our experimental data reveal the temperature dependence of the OCS yield over the aforementioned range of surface temperatures. Our experimental results indicate that thermal O atoms can readily convert CS2 contained in the icy mantles on interstellar grains to OCS, without the need for energetic processing of the ice. Our data set shows that this reaction proceeds at surface temperatures as low as 15 K. Therefore, contrary to previous suggestions, CS2 molecules in icy mantles are perhaps unlikely to account for a substantial proportion of the sulphur content of dense interstellar clouds. Reaction barriers and Arrhenius pre-exponential factors, and hence rate constants, are derived for this surface reaction by fitting our experimental data using a kinetic model. Additionally, this modelling procedure yields values for the desorption energies of O atoms and OCS.