📄 Showing the "Simple" version — "Popular" is not ready yet. Add it to favorites to help prioritize it. Ask for the full read

In a cold gas cloud right at the center of our Galaxy, designated G+0.693-0.027, hides a true chemical laboratory. There, far from stars, on the surfaces of tiny dust grains, about the size of smoke particles, atoms stick together into molecules, like dough on a kitchen counter. Recently, scientists pointed two large radio telescopes at this cloud and recorded its "radio voice"—a spectrum in which each molecule leaves its unique fingerprint.

In this spectrum, they found several organic compounds consisting of three carbon atoms, six hydrogen atoms, and two oxygen atoms. Previously, only one such "isomer"—a molecule with the same formula but different arrangement of atoms — had been found in space. Now the list has grown: for the first time beyond Earth, lactaldehyde and methoxyacetaldehyde have been detected. Lactaldehyde is like a sugar with a bite taken out of it: it forms during the breakdown of lactic acid and participates in biochemical processes. Methoxyacetaldehyde is its cousin, where oxygen is inserted into the chain differently.

Scientists believe that the main building material is carbon monoxide (CO), which sticks to a dust grain and gradually gains hydrogen, turning into methanol and ethanol. These alcohols then combine with other molecular fragments to produce the full variety of C3H6O2. But propionic acid, which calculations suggest should be the most stable of all, was not found in the cloud. Its formation pathway is different, through the addition of oxygen to CO, and apparently, under these conditions, it doesn't work.

So space is not a void but a slow kitchen where complex organic dishes are prepared from simple gases. The newly found molecules are further evidence that the chemistry of life can begin long before planets form.