LONDON: For the first time, astronomers have detected the presence of complex organic molecules, the building blocks of life, in a protoplanetary disc surrounding a young star.
The discovery, made with the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimeter Array (ALMA), reaffirms that the conditions that spawned the Earth and Sun are not unique in the universe, researchers said.
The new ALMA observations show that the protoplanetary disc surrounding the young star MWC 480 contains large amounts of methyl cyanide (CH3CN), a complex carbon-based molecule.
There is enough methyl cyanide around MWC 480 to fill all of Earth’s oceans.
This molecule and its simpler cousin hydrogen cyanide (HCN) were found in the cold outer reaches of the star’s newly formed disc.
