Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, researchers at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands have for the first time detected di
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Astronomer Alice Booth of Leiden University in the Netherlands, who led a study recently published in
Nature Astronomy, and her research team have found the first evidence of methanol (CH3OH) that survived the transition from a deep freeze to a warm star-forming disc and it’s a lot of methanol.
“The only efficient way to make methanol is on the icy surfaces of dust grains. For this to happen, carbon monoxide gas also needs to be frozen,” Booth told SYFY WIRE. “The disc we looked at is ‘warm’, over 30 Kelvin (-405.67 Fahrenheit). CH3OH can’t form in the disc itself. The cold dark cloud that was there before the star formed is where we think the methanol came from.”
Date Time
Discovery of methanol in a ‘warm’ planet-forming disk
Astronomers have identified the molecule methanol in the ‘warm zones’ of a protoplanetary disk circling a star about 360 light years from Earth.
The finding is significant because although methanol – CH3OH – is one of the simpler complex carbon-based molecules, it is a precursor chemical involved in the creation of more complex substances such as amino acids and proteins, the building blocks of life.
The methanol was identified by an international team of astronomers, including scientists from the University of Leeds, studying a star known as HD 100546 and its protoplanetary disk, the swirling dust and gas from which a planet is born. They are about 10 million years old and located in the direction of the southern constellation of the Fly (Musca).
SN: 2/18/08). But astronomers didn’t know whether organic material from interstellar space could survive the formation of a protoplanetary disk, or whether organic chemistry had to start from scratch around new stars. Sign Up For the Latest from
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“When you form a star and its disk, it’s not a very easy, breezy process,” says Alice Booth, an astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Radiation from the new star and shock waves in the imploding material, she says, “could destroy a lot of the molecules that were originally in your initial cloud.”