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The Taurus Molecular Cloud is an active site for star formation. It is also filled with complex organic molecules, including the kind that are building blocks for life. The Cloud is 450 light years away, but similar star-forming regions with complex organics are found thoughout the galaxy. (Adapted, ESA/Herschel/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Recent reports about the detection of carbon-based organic molecules on Mars by the instruments of the Perseverance rover included suggestions that some of the organics may well have fallen from space over the eons, and were then preserved on the Martian surface.

Given the cruciality of organics as building blocks of life –or even as biosignatures of past life — it seems surely important to understand more about how and where the organics might form in interstellar space, and how they might get to Mars, Earth and elsewhere.

After all, “follow the organics” has replaced the NASA rallying cry to “follow the water” in the search for extraterrestrial life in the solar system and cosmos.

And it turns out that seeking out and identifying organics in space is a growing field of its own that has produced many surprising discoveries. That was made clear during a recent NASA webinar featuring Samantha Scibelli of the University of Arizona, a doctoral student in astronomy and astrophysics who has spent long hours looking for these organics in space and finding them.

She and associate professor of astronomy Yancy Shirley have been studying the presence and nature of complex organics in particular in a rich star-forming region, the Taurus Molecular Cloud.

Using the nearby radio observatory at Kitt Peak outside of Tucson, she has found a range of complex organics in starless or pre-stellar cores with the Cloud. The campaign is unique in that some 700 hours of observing time were given to them, allowing for perhaps the most thorough observations of its kind.

The results have been surprising and intriguing.

In this mosaic image stretching 340 light-years across, the James Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) displays the Tarantula Nebula star-forming region in a new light, including tens of thousands of never-before-seen young stars that were previously shrouded in cosmic dust. The most active region appears to sparkle with massive young stars, appearing pale blue. (NASA/STScI)

A first take-away (surprising to those unfamiliar with the field) is that complex organics are often detected in these star-forming regions throughout the galaxy and cosmos — just as they were found in many regions of the Taurus cloud.… Read more

This snakelike gas cloud (center dark area) in the constellation Musca resembles a skinny filament. But it’s actually a flat sheet that extends about 20 light-years into space away from Earth, an analysis finds.
(Dylan O’Donnell, deography.com/WikiCommons)

When thinking and talking about “astrobiology,” many people are inclined to think of alien creatures that often look rather like us, but with some kind of switcheroo. Life, in this view, means something rather like us that just happens to live on another planet and perhaps uses different techniques to stay alive.

But as defined by NASA, and what “astrobiology” is in real scientific terms, is the search for life beyond Earth and the exploration of how life began here. They may seem like very different subjects but are actually joined at the hip; having a deeper understanding of how life originated on Earth is surely one of the most important set of clues to how to find it elsewhere.

Those con-joined scientific disciplines — the search for extraterrestrial life and the extraordinarily difficult task of analyzing how it started here — together raise another most complex challenge.

Precisely how far back do we look when trying to understand the origins of life? Do we look to Darwin’s “warm little pond?” To the Miller-Urey experiment’s conclusion that organic building blocks of life can be formed by sparking some common gases and water with electricity? To an understanding the nature and evolution of our atmosphere?

The answer is “yes” to all, as well as to scores of additional essential dynamics of our galaxies. Because to begin to answer those three questions, we also have to know how planets form, the chemical make-up of the cosmos, how different suns effect different exoplanets and so much more.

This is why I was so interested in reading about a breakthrough approach to understanding the shape and nature of interstellar clouds. Because it is when those clouds of gas and dust collapse under their own gravitational attraction that stars are formed — and, of course, none of the above questions have meaning without preexisting stars.

In theory, the scope of astrobiology could go back further than star-formation, but I take my lead from Mary Voytek, chief scientist for astrobiology at NASA. The logic of star formation is part of astrobiology, she says, but the innumerable cosmological developments going back to the Big Bang are not.

So by understanding something new about interstellar clouds — in this case determining the 3D structure of such a “cloud” — we are learning about some of the very earliest questions of astrobiology, the process that led over the eons to us and most likely life of some sort on the billions of exoplanets we now know are out there.… Read more

Many Worlds

Tag: star formation

Many Complex Organic Compounds –Evolved Building Blocks of Life — Are Formed Where Stars Are Being Born

First Mapping of Interstellar Clouds in Three Dimensions; a Key Breakthrough for Better Understanding Star Formation

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