Sheng-Yuan Liu

In the stellar nursery HOPS-288, where three suns are forming, the ALMA telescope revealed two scorching regions around a pair of them. At –170°C, ice on cosmic dust melts, and reactions bubble up in the gas: organic molecules are born — methanol and methyl formate.

Long before a star ignites in a gas cloud, chemical life is already bustling. In cold, dense clumps of gas, called starless cores, atoms stick together to form molecules, both simple and complex. To peer into this invisible kitchen, astronomers aimed a 40-meter radio telescope in Yebes at 23 such clouds in the Orion Nebula.

Imagine a packed orchestra, each musician playing their own part, while you try to pick out the quiet voice of a rare flute: its melody drowns in the sound of violins and trumpets. That's what hunting for molecules in interstellar clouds is like: telescopes pick up the 'radio voices' of countless substances, and picking out the signal you want from the noise is no easy task.