Our solar system may not be as special as we thought. A new study of a young stars protoplanetary disk finds the same kinds of complex organic molecules that are found on the comets in our own solar system.
The findings, published in the journal Nature, show that the same chemical building blocks that support the kind of life as we know it may regularly form around far-off stars.
From my point of view, its really good news that were not that special,"said lead author Karin berg, an astrochemist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "We know that life originated somehow in the solar system and it would be very exciting if it also originated somewhere else.
Having the same kind of chemistry present," she added, "removes one more barrier to that being true.
Scientists have long wondered what life around other stars, if it exists, might look like. Life on Earth is based around carbon and a handful of other key elements, including nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen. But its unclear if the same kind of life-friendly chemistry has arisen on other worlds outside of our own backyard.
berg and her colleagues had been using a radio telescope array called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile to study a star system called MWC 480, which lies roughly 455 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.
MWC 480 is very young, and so it still has a wide disk of protoplanetary debris surrounding the star. The stuff in the protoplanetary disk will eventually coalesce to form planets, moons, asteroids, comets the typical denizens of a fully fledged planetary system.
Our own solar system went through the same process, and so MWC 480 offers something of a snapshot into what our suns protoplanetary disk might have looked like before the planets were formed.
The scientists hadnt been looking for signs of such complex organic molecules, berg said. But when they went through the data they found a surprising signal one that appeared to be coming from cyanides, particularly complex cyanides. Along with the simplest molecule, hydrogen cyanide (HCN), they also found cyanoacetylene (HC3N) and methyl cyanide (CH3CN).
The discovery involved "a bit of luck," berg said. "We weren't actually looking for these complex organics."
Original post:
Eureka! Complex organic molecules found in a young star system