cyanides tagged posts

This artistic impression shows the universe around the star formation area with, as an overlay, the scientists’ observations.(c) Veronica Allen/Alexandra Elconin (http://alsewhere.weebly.com)

An international team of astronomers, led by Dutch scientists, has discovered a region in our Milky Way that contains many nitrogen compounds in the southeast of a butterfly-shaped star formation disk and very little in the north-west. The astronomers suspect that multiple stars-to-be share the same star formation disk, but the precise process is still a puzzle.

They studied the star forming region G35.20-0.74N, more than 7000 light years from Earth in the southern sky. The astronomers used the (sub)millimeter telescope ALMA which can map molecular gas clouds in which stars form...

A computer simulation of the formation of complex organic molecules in space. The spherical molecular structures forming on the graphene surface at 3000 K are similar in shape to fullerenes. The red atoms originated in the gas phase and the white atoms are from the surface. Credit: Marshall and Sadeghpour

The space between stars is not empty, but contains an abundance of diffuse material, about 5-10% of the total mass of our galaxy (excluding dark matter). Most of the material is gas, predominantly hydrogen, but with a small and important component in complex carbon-bearing molecules including ethene, benzene, propynal, methanol and other alcohols, cyanides, simple amino acids, and even larger molecules (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and buckyballs) with 50 or more carbon atoms...