Astronomers searching for the building blocks of life in a
giant dust cloud at the heart of the Milky Way have concluded that it contains
the chemical ethyl formate, which gives raspberries their flavour and smells of
rum.
The unanticipated discovery follows years of work by
astronomers who trained their 30m radio telescope on the enormous ball of dust
and gas in the hope of spotting complex molecules that are vital for life.
Finding amino acids in interstellar space is a Holy Grail for
astrobiologists, as this would raise the possibility of life emerging on other
planets after being seeded with the molecules.
In the latest survey, astronomers sifted through thousands of
signals from Sagittarius B2, a vast dust cloud at the centre of our galaxy.
While they failed to find evidence for amino acids, they did
find a substance called ethyl formate, the chemical responsible for the flavour
of raspberries.
Curiously, ethyl formate has another distinguishing
characteristic: it also smells of rum.
The astronomers used the IRAM telescope in Spain to analyse
electromagnetic radiation emitted by a hot and dense region of Sagittarius B2
that surrounds a newborn star.
Radiation from the star is absorbed by molecules floating
around in the gas cloud, which is then re-emitted at different energies
depending on the type of molecule.
While scouring their data, the team also found evidence for
the lethal chemical propyl cyanide in the same cloud.
The two molecules are the largest yet discovered in deep
space.
The latest discoveries have boosted the researchers morale because the molecules are as large as the simplest amino acid, glycine.
Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins and are widely
seen as being critical for complex life to exist anywhere in the universe.
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