A team led by researchers from MIT, in the United States, discovered large molecules containing carbon in an interstellar cloud away from gas and dust, reports Science Alert.
The result, presented in the magazine Scienceshows that complex organic molecules (with carbon and hydrogen) likely existed in the cold, dark gas cloud that gave rise to the Solar System.
Furthermore, the molecules stayed together until after the Earth was formed. This is important for understanding the early origin of life on our planet.
Molecules formed from rings of carbon atoms
The molecule in question is called “pyrene”, a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH). The name tells us that these molecules are made up of rings of carbon atoms.
The composition of carbon is the basis of life on Earth. PAHs have long been known to be abundant in the interstellar medium, so they figure prominently in theories of how life on Earth arose.
Many large PAHs are known to exist in space because astrophysicists have detected signatures of them in visible and infrared light, but it was not known which PAHs they might be in particular.
Pyrene is now the largest PAH detected in space, although it is a simple PAH with 26 atoms. For a long time it was believed that such molecules could not survive the harsh environment of star formation, where everything is bathed in the sun’s radiation, which destroys complex molecules.
Last year, scientists reported finding large amounts of pyrene in samples taken from the asteroid Ryugu in our own Solar System. They argued that at least some of it must come from the cold interstellar cloud that preceded the Solar System.
Source: www.descopera.ro
