Complex form of carbon spotted outside solar system for first time

Complex carbon-based molecules crucial to life on Earth originated somewhere in space, but we didn’t know where. Now, huge amounts of them have been spotted in a huge, cold cloud of gas

By Alex Wilkins

24 October 2024

Compounds called pyrenes have been detected in the Taurus molecular cloud

ESO

A complex form of carbon crucial for life on Earth has been spotted outside the solar system for the first time. Its presence helps show how the compounds needed for life could come from space.

The most abundant form of carbon in the universe is that found in carbon monoxide gas, but it is unclear how this turns into the complex compounds found in biological life, which typically contain stronger chemical bonds.

Astronomers have spotted asteroids – such as Ryugu – containing compounds with these stronger carbon bonds. It is thought that such space rocks may have delivered the ingredients for life to Earth, but the original source of these carbon-based compounds still isn’t well understood.

Advertisement

Read more

Freeze-thaw cycle helps asteroids ferry molecules of life to planets

Now, Brett McGuire at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues have looked for and detected a complex, carbon-based molecule called pyrene in a star-forming region called the Taurus molecular cloud. At 430 light years away, this is one of the closest such clouds to Earth.

The researchers used the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia to search for the radio signature of pyrene. Such molecules would be crucial intermediaries between carbon monoxide and complex carbon molecules in living organisms.