Is life in the entire cosmos widespread? Complex organic molecules found on planet-birthing disc

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Astronomers have found signs of complex organic molecules, the forerunners of the building blocks of life as we know them in a planetary screen around a distant star. The results imply that the chemical seeds of life are constructed in space and are then spread out on young or newly forming planets.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/ Submillimeter Array (ALMA), a system of radio telescopes in Chile, the team recognized traces of 17 complex organic molecules in the protoplanetary disc from V883 Orionis, a young star that is around 1,305 light years in the construction of Orion.

V883 Orionis is a children’s star or a protostar that is only 500,000 years old, and he is in the active phase of collecting mass and the formation of planets. When 0.5 million years old appear, remember that our middle -aged sun is about 4.6 billion Years old.

Complex organic molecules are molecules with more than five atoms, of which at least one carbon is. They were previously seen at locations of star and planet formation.

However, the connections discovered around V883 Orionis include the first preliminary detection of ethylene glycol and glycolonitrile as well as compounds that are regarded as the forerunners of the building blocks of life. For example, glycolonitril is a forerunner of the amino acids glycin and alanine as well as the nucleobase adenin, one of the building blocks of DNA and RNA.

The find could therefore be a lack of connection in the history of the development of molecules around young stars, which makes up the time between the initial formation of stars and the growth of planets in their surrounding protoplanetic windows.

“Our result points to a straight line of chemical enrichment and increasing complexity between interstellar clouds and fully developed planetary systems,” said team leader Abubakar Fadul, scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Germany.

A cosmic chemical assembly line

Stars begin life when covered lumps in huge clouds of interstellar gas and dust collapse under their own gravity. This creates a protostar that continues to collect matter from his birth cover until he has a sufficient mass to trigger the fusion of hydrogen to helium in its core. This is the nuclear process that defines what a main sequence star is.

During this progress, the material around the prospective star flies into a swirling donut of gas and dust, which is referred to as a protoplanetary disc and will ultimately be created from the planet.

The transition from the protostar to a young main sequence is violent, full of radiation, shocked gas and gas, which is ejected by the protoplanetar disc. This becomes harmful to the continued existence of complex chemicals in earlier stages of the existence of the protostar.

This has led to the development of a so-called “reset scenario”, in which the chemicals are formed in later phases of the existence of the protoplanetar disc as planets, asteroids and comets.

However, the new discovery indicates that this reset scenario is unnecessary.

“Now it seems that the opposite is true,” said team member and Mpia scientist Kamber Schwarz. “Our results suggest that protoplanetar slices inherit complex molecules from previous stages and the formation of complex molecules can be continued during the protoplanetary hard disk stage.”

The team theoretizes that the period between the energetic protostellar phase and the establishment of a protoplanetary hard disk would be too short to form complex organic molecules in detectable quantities. The result of this is that the conditions that present biological processes may not be limited to individual planetary systems, but are more common.

Since the chemical reactions that create complex organic molecules are better tackled under colder conditions, they can occur in icy dust, which later gather too large body.

This means that these molecules in young planetary systems could remain hidden in dust, rock and ice and only heat these materials when heating the central star.

This is something that can be seen in our own solar system when comets from the outer region of our planetary system get near the sun and create comettes and halos called Comas.

Although V883 Orionis has not yet reached the mass to achieve a nuclear fusion, there is a heating mechanism for a similar in this young system: If the material falls into the star and its growth facilitates, intensive radiation is triggered.

“These outbursts are strong enough to heat the surrounding disc up to otherwise icy environments and to release the chemicals we discovered,” said Fadul.

It is fitting that Alma, a number of 66 radiotelescopes in the ATACAMA desert region of North Chile, was an essential part of the deeper classification in the disc around V883 Orionis. Finally, this array in 2016 discovered the water snow line in the disc of V883 Orionis.

“Although this result is exciting, we still have not released all the signatures that we found in our spectra,” said Schwarz. “Data with higher resolution confirm the recognitions of ethylene glycol and glycolonitrile and may even show more complex chemicals that we have not yet identified.”

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Fadul suggested that astronomers have to look at light from stars such as V883 Orionis and its protoplanetary disc in other wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum in order to find even more developed molecules.

“Who knows what else we could discover?” Fadul Castle.

The team’s research is available as a form in the paper repository Arxiv.