2024-10-25 09:45:00
Scientists have discovered the presence in space of a class of molecules that store a lot of carbon; This chemical compound is estimated to be the main carbon sink in the cosmic environment.
The discovery was made following the detection of pyrene in large quantities, via one of its derivatives, in a distant interstellar cloud.
Pyrene is one of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons known mainly by its English acronym, PAH.
The discovery was made by a team that includes, among others, Gabi Wenzel and Brett McGuire, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.
The discovery of pyrene in this distant cloud, similar to the collection of dust and gas that eventually became our solar system, suggests that pyrene may have been the source of much of the carbon in our solar system. This hypothesis is also supported by the recent discovery that samples taken from the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu contain large amounts of pyrene.
Because of its symmetry, pyrene itself is invisible to radio astronomy techniques used to detect about 95 percent of chemicals in space. Instead of trying to detect it directly, the researchers looked for and detected an isomer of cyanopyrene (a version of pyrene that reacted with cyanide, losing its symmetry). This chemical compound was detected in a distant cloud known as TMC-1, using the 100-meter GBT radio telescope, located at the Green Bank astronomical observatory in West Virginia, USA.
Gabi Wenzel (left) and Brett McGuire. (Photo: Bryce Vickmark/MIT. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
The study is titled “Detection of Interstellar 1-Cyanopyrene: A Four-Ring Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon.” And it was published in the academic journal Science. (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)
#Carbon #concentration #cosmos