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techniques face important limitations. Radio and rotational spectroscopy are blind to molecules without a dipole moment, such as H₂, and in general are less sensitive to large, complex molecules. Spectroscopic methods that rely on gas-phase transitions also cannot detect species that are frozen onto grains. In dense molecular clouds, where temperatures are typically 10 to 50 K, most molecules other than dihydrogen are in the solid phase, forming thin ice mantles on dust particles. In these ices, the initial chemistry is controlled

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