Star Surrounded by Ingredients for Life |
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Written by spacetravel.org
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Monday, 26 December 2005 22:11 |
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Scientists have found the first evidence that the basic organic building blocks of life can exist in an Earthlike orbit around a young Sun-like star.
NASAs Spitzer space telescope took infrared spectrograms of 100 very young stars in a nearby stellar nursery, a huge cloud of dust and gas 375 light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. They found acetylene and hydrogen cyanide in a ring of dust and gas circling a young star called IRS 46. Acetylene and hydrogen cyanide are organic gases which, when combined with water, can form several different amino acids, as well as adenine, one of the bases of DNA.
The spectographic data showed that the gases were so hot they must have been orbiting approximately in its habitable zone, the region where Earth orbits the Sun and where water is just at the borderline between liquid and gaseous states.
This observation supports the theory that many of the molecular building blocks of life could be found in the solar system before the planets were formed. Acetylene and hydrogen cyanide were previously detected in comets and in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn.
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