Complex organic molecules are the building blocks of life. The discovery was made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and reaffirms the notion that our sun and Earth are not unique in the universe, according to a press release from European Southern Observatory (ESO).
The new ALMA observations reveal that the protoplanetary disc surrounding the young star MWC 480 contains large amounts of a complex carbon-based molecule, methyl cyanide (CH3CN) - enough to fill all of Earth's oceans. Both this molecule and its cousin hydrogen cyanide (HCN) were found in the cold outer reaches of the star's newly formed disc, in a region that astronomers believe is analogous to the Kuiper Belt - the realm of icy planetesimals and comets in our own solar system beyond Neptune.
"Studies of comets and asteroids show that the solar nebula that spawned the Sun and planets was rich in water and complex organic compounds," said lead author Karin Öberg, an astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., according to the press release. "We now have even better evidence that this same chemistry exists elsewhere in the Universe, in regions that could form solar systems not unlike our own."
The star MWC 480 is about twice the mass of the sun and is located 455 light-years away in the Taurus star-forming region. Studies with ALMA and other telescopes have yet to find any obvious signs of planet formation in it.
"From the study of exoplanets, we know the Solar System isn't unique in its number of planets or abundance of water," concluded Öberg, according to the press release. "Now we know we're not unique in organic chemistry. Once more, we have learnt that we're not special. From a life in the Universe point of view, this is great news."
The results are published in the April 9 issue of the journal Nature. The paper is titled, "The Cometary Composition of a Protoplanetary Disk as Revealed by Complex Cyanides."
The team is composed of Karin I. Öberg (Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics), Viviana V. Guzmán (Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics), Kenji Furuya (Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands), Chunhua Qi (Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics), Yuri Aikawa (Kobe University, Kobe, Japan), Sean M. Andrews (Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics), Ryan Loomis (Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics) and David J. Wilner (Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics).
