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+--- Thread: Article Astrochemistry, inside cosmic kitchens (/thread-16850.html)
Astrochemistry, inside cosmic kitchens - C C - Nov 18, 2024
https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/astrochemistry-inside-cosmic-kitchens
INTRO: Astrochemistry, a relatively new field, focuses on exploring chemistry in interstellar spaces to uncover insights about the origins of life on Earth. This discipline has seen significant advancements in recent years.
Born in the late 1930s with the development of spectroscopy and radio astronomy, astrochemistry, a field at the intersection of astrophysics and chemistry, is now mature. New means for observing the sky using infrared and radio have increased its capacity to remotely detect molecules in space, while the trove of information sent by the probes crisscrossing the Solar System—and advances in instrumentation—have provided it with the tools needed to test its hypotheses through realistic experiments.
“The interstellar environment is not made up of a vacuum,” reveals Grégoire Danger, an academic at the Physics Laboratory of Ionic and Molecular Interactions.1 In regions of star formation, the opposite would even be true. Frozen in the darkness at temperatures between -253 °C and -263 °C are large clouds consisting of 99% molecular hydrogen and volatile trace elements. When reacting with the atoms adsorbed at the surface of micrometre-sized dust grains circulating in these environments, these gases enable the formation of ice made of water, ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane, and methanol. Under the influence of cosmic rays, they are then loaded with other chemical compounds such as carbon monoxide and formaldehyde, with over two hundred gas and solid species being known.
These giant structures later collapse onto themselves and give birth to stars and planets that, by accreting the surrounding gas, allow light to circulate freely and heat the superficial layers of the “lumps” of matter in orbit, such as comets and other asteroids. This “photolysis” sparks a new chemical chain reaction leading to the appearance of even more complex molecules. These icy and rocky bodies, which are too small to be totally modified by their internal heat, massively bombarded the Earth four billion years ago, which is why one well-known hypothesis posits that they provided the building blocks for the appearance of life on Earth... (MORE - details)