organic molecules in space

In a chunk of the meteorite EET 87720, found in Antarctic ice, lies a pink grain of sand. It's spinel, a mineral almost never seen in ureilites, and here it grew to half a millimeter. Such a find is like a time capsule from an early melt: it solidified when the parent body was just beginning to cool.

In the coldest, darkest corners of space, dust grains get covered in ice, like a window on a frosty day. This ice isn't just frozen water: it also contains carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. From such ice, comets and planets may eventually assemble. But until now, it was unclear how the dust grain itself affects the ice that forms on it.

An accountant tallies up all the factories, warehouses, and shops, but the balance doesn't add up — half the inventory seems to have evaporated. That's roughly how astronomers have spent decades searching for ordinary matter in the present-day Universe.

In the cold Taurus cloud, where stars are born, telescopes have detected molecules with the smell of bitter almonds — aromatic nitriles. On Earth, you can find them in peach pits, but in space they hang in icy dust. What happens to them under the harsh ultraviolet light of young stars? Chemists recreated this process in the lab.

In a dense molecular cloud, at the edge of glowing gas, an invisible assembly line is at work. It takes simple scraps — single atoms and light pairs — and glues them together step by step into long carbon chains and rings. The first piece of this assembly line has long eluded our eyes. Now it has been found.

In a dense molecular cloud, at the edge of glowing gas, an invisible assembly line is at work. It takes simple scraps — single atoms and light pairs — and glues them together step by step into long carbon chains and rings. The first piece of this assembly line has long eluded our eyes. Now it has been found.

In dark interstellar clouds where new stars are born, chemistry starts with a tiny particle — the trihydrogen ion (H₃⁺). It collides with other atoms and sets off a cascade of reactions that build ever more complex molecules. For a long time, it was thought that the main reaction producing it, H₂⁺ colliding with H₂, only happens in the gas phase.

In the black depths of space, on the surfaces of tiny icy dust grains, a quiet construction is underway. There, where temperatures drop to near absolute zero and harsh radiation abounds, the ordinary amino acid glycine, the simplest protein building block, links up with itself.

A planet in the habitable zone is no guarantee of life. Like a conductor leading an orchestra, a star dictates the tempo and character of planetary atmosphere evolution over billions of years.

A speed of 7,5 kilometers per second is the threshold beyond which a cosmic collision turns dust grains into a chemical reactor. In the interstellar medium drift tiny cosmic dust grains — the legacy of dying stars.

The light of a distant star carries within it the silent hum of the atmospheres of planets orbiting it. For a long time, capturing it was like trying to make out a whisper over a roaring waterfall. But with the advent of the 39-meter Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) and the ANDES spectrograph with a resolution of 100,000, this task is no longer hopeless.

The universe sounds with silence. The lion's share of matter — about 85%—remains invisible, manifesting only through gravity. Back when Vera Rubin Vera Rubin showed that galaxies spin as if wrapped in unseen mass.

The Orion Nebula is a showcase of astrophysics, a laboratory for studying star formation right in our backyard. For over a century, its light has been split into spectra, and each forbidden line whispers its own version of how many electrons per cubic centimeter.

The search for life beyond Earth is like tuning an old radio: we listen to the chemical whisper of distant exoplanets' atmospheres, trying to pick up signs of biological activity.

Ever since Voyager 2 raced past Uranus in 1986, the planet's icy moons have kept a mystery: where does the carbon dioxide on their surfaces come from? The spectrometers of that era only hinted at the presence of CO₂, but couldn't say anything about its origin.

Spectroscopy has always been a way to hear the unheard. Back in the 19th century, Johann Balmer deciphered the elegant lines of hydrogen — a simple numerical harmony that foreshadowed quantum theory.

Ever since Voyager 2 raced past Uranus in 1986, the planet's icy moons have kept a mystery: where does the carbon dioxide on their surfaces come from? The spectrometers of that era only hinted at the presence of CO₂, but couldn't say anything about its origin.

Spectroscopy has always been a way to hear the unheard. Back in the 19th century, Johann Balmer deciphered the elegant lines of hydrogen — a simple numerical harmony that foreshadowed quantum theory.

Tiny seeds of life can cross the black void on icy wanderers like comet 3I/ATLAS. The James Webb Space Telescope found water and methane on it for the first time, and light analysis revealed an unusual gas composition.

In 2019, an unusual visitor, comet 3I/ATLAS, zoomed into the Solar System. It came from another star, and for the first time, astronomers were able to see what its dusty tail is made of.

The Martian surface is a place where anything alive quickly dies. Cosmic rays and ubiquitous oxidizers sterilize the top layer of soil. But dig a little deeper, and the picture changes. There, beyond the reach of ultraviolet light, a zone suitable for life may lurk. This zone runs on a strange fuel — radiation.

Dark matter detectors are essentially incredibly sensitive microphones, capable of hearing a whisper amid the roar of a rock concert. Their job is to catch the rare nudges from hypothetical dark matter particles, which are thought to occasionally collide with atomic nuclei of ordinary matter.

In the attic, you find an old, worn suitcase. From the stickers and scratches, you can guess where it's been. Astronomers have long searched for a similar 'sticker' for planets, and thought they found it in carbon monoxide molecules. Ordinary carbon monoxide consists of a carbon-12 atom and an oxygen atom.

The James Webb Space Telescope peered into a disk of gas and dust around a young star where planets are born, and for the first time spotted ice made of heavy water. This water is not ordinary: in its molecules, regular hydrogen is replaced by deuterium, its heavier sibling.

Two guitar strings are stretched on the same neck. They are almost identical, but one is slightly shorter — and they sound different. That's roughly how the two isomers of ethanimine work: molecules with the same set of atoms but rotated differently in space. Astronomers spotted this molecule in the dense clouds near the center of our Galaxy.

Civilizations in the Universe are separated not just by distance, but by the vast gulf of time. Hunting for their traces is like archaeology: instead of palace ruins, we find clouds of cosmic dust.

In an oven, a huge loaf of bread is baking. Inside the dough, there is a tiny, hottest spot: that's where the future loaf begins to rise. A hot molecular core (a region the size of the Solar System, where gas is heated to hundreds of degrees and compressed to billions of times the density of ordinary clouds) works in much the same way.

Interstellar space is not a cosmic desert, but a super-fast highway. Trillions of asteroids and comets from other systems race past us, yet camera-telescopes only catch a few. Imagine a night highway: the headlights of a distant car flash brightly, but if it zooms by too fast, the camera shutter can't click in time.

Interstellar space is not a cosmic desert, but a super-fast highway. Trillions of asteroids and comets from other systems race past us, yet camera-telescopes only catch a few. Imagine a night highway: the headlights of a distant car flash brightly, but if it zooms by too fast, the camera shutter can't click in time.

In the orchestra of interstellar life search, every note counts. And the score here is dictated not by man, but by a distant star. For the planet TRAPPIST-1 e, one of seven in the system of an ultracool red dwarf, the conductor's baton is harsh ultraviolet light.

In the heart of the Milky Way, in the cloud G+0.693, astronomers caught a sweet signal — emission lines of erythrulose, a simple sugar with four carbon atoms and four oxygen atoms.

In the heart of the Milky Way, in the cloud G+0.693, astronomers caught a sweet signal — emission lines of erythrulose, a simple sugar with four carbon atoms and four oxygen atoms.

In cold molecular clouds, where temperatures drop to 10 K, chemistry does not freeze. It turns into a slow, error-free dance. Invisible ions, like nocturnal bees, carry carbon 'pollen grains' from molecule to molecule. They stitch aromatic rings into intricate polycyclic structures.

The mystery of the main break in the spectrum of galactic cosmic rays, the knee at 3 PeV, has persisted for nearly a century.

The birth of planets is a cosmic forge: gas and dust compress, shock waves and harsh radiation burn away all complexity. It was thought that fragile organic threads like cyanopolyynes couldn't survive this hell.

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.

From carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur, you can assemble 10⁶⁰ different small molecules: that's a 1 with 60 zeros, more than the stars in the visible universe. Life uses only a tiny fraction of this menu, but not randomly.

The search for extraterrestrial life is like a detective investigation: from tiny clues, you must distinguish traces of life from random imprints of non-living nature. On Saturn's moon Enceladus, the investigators are lucky — geysers burst from cracks in the icy crust, ejecting water from the subsurface ocean straight into space.

A supernova is the final explosion of a massive star, scattering its material over light-years. Inside the expanding shell, a neutron star remains, and the shell itself continues to plow through interstellar gas for thousands of years.

A tiny charged top is locked inside a freezer the size of a pea. The temperature is four degrees above absolute zero, and thermal jitter is nearly halted. This top is a molecular ion — OH⁺ — stripped of an electron, leaving a positive charge.