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.”