Human Recognition

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,

And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.” 

― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

An Intriguing Cosmic Distortion | Space Wallpaper

Long ago Albert Einstein predicted a gravitational lensing effect of light from one object by the mass of another object. In this image the mass of one, nearer galaxy, shown in blue, distorts the light from another more distant but aligned galaxy, shown in red. Also, an unknown dwarf planet, shown as a white dot on the left side, comes into focus because of the lensing effect as well. Read More

[Image: Y. Hezaveh (Stanford) et al., ALMA (NRAO/ESO/NAOJ), NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope]

Methanol, a Building Block of Life, Found Around Newborn Star for 1st Time

17 JUNE 2016       SPACE       JESSE EMSPAK

Some of the building blocks of life are likely present on many planets from day one, a new study suggests.

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array(ALMA) in Chile spotted methanol in the dusty disk around a newborn star, marking the first time this carbon-containing organic molecule has been spotted in a planet-forming environment. 

"Methanol in gaseous form in the disk is an unambiguous indicator of rich organic chemical processes at an early stage of star and planet formation," study co-author Ryan Loomis, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in a statement. "This result has an impact on our understanding of how organic matter accumulates in very young planetary systems." 

ALMA — a collection of radio telescopes high in the Andes Mountains of northern Chile — looked at the sun-like star TW Hydrae, which lies about 170 light-years from Earth. 

Astronomers think TW Hydrae is about 80 percent the mass of the sun, and much younger — barely 10 million years old. (The sun formed about 4.6 billion years ago.) TW Hydrae is surrounded by a disk of dust and gas that could one day form a planetary system.ALMA mapped the chemical composition of the disk and found methanol, also known as methyl alcohol (CH3OH). 

Methanol is a relatively simple organic molecule, but it's one of the largest molecules ever found in a protoplanetary disk, researchers said. 

Methanol forms as a solid (an ice) on the surface of grains in frigid dust clouds. That means the dust grains are releasing it into space, study team members said. 

The methanol was found in a region where comets may be forming, some 30 to 100 astronomical units (AU) out from TW Hydrae. (One AU is the distance from Earth to the sun — about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.)   

Comets might be one source of the organic molecules that formed the basis of the first self-replicating molecules on our own planet, so the new results could have bearing on the origins of life on Earth, study team members said. 

The study was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on May 13. Read More

[Image: ESO/M. Kornmesser]

'Twisty' Molecule Essential to Life Spotted in Deep Space For 1st Time

14 JUNE 2016       SPACE       SARAH LEWIN

Molecules with "right-handed" and "left-handed" versions are essential to all life on Earth, and have been found in meteors and comets. Now, for the first time, one has been spotted in interstellar space.

Discovering such molecules in deep space, called chiral molecules, can help researchers understand the development of life on Earth, which is rich in those complex molecules — what presenters at the American Astronomical Society's summer meeting in San Diego called "life's first handshake." The discovery is explained in this new video by Science Magazine.

"This [discovery] is going to provide us with a laboratory to try to test theories about the role that chiral molecules played in the origins of life here on Earth and how that chirality might play a role in the origins of life elsewhere in the galaxy," Brett McGuire, a researcher at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Virginia and co-first author on the new work, said at the AAS press conference today (June 14). 

The researchers used the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes radio telescope in Australia to pinpoint the intricate molecule propylene oxide near the center of the Milky Way, in the mammoth star-forming cloud of gas called Sagittarius B2. 

Science of chirality 

Key biological reactions on Earth rely on molecules with the property called chirality — compounds that can form in two different varieties that are mirror images of each other, sort of like left and right hands. Though the molecules are made of the same components, it's impossible to flip one around to make it exactly match the other. 

On Earth, most chiral molecules exist largely in a single formation, even though when you create them chemically from scratch, both varieties will form. Many chemical reactions only work when molecules of a particular "handedness" interact with each other. 

"When you shake somebody's hand, your right hand shakes another right hand, and it forms that nice, interlocking gesture; if you try to shake a left hand with your right hand it's a little awkward because the interaction is different," McGuire said. "Chiral molecules work the same way." 

(For instance, the chemical carvone will smell like spearmint in one configuration, but its mirror image smells like caraway.) 

Processes powered by one particular "handedness" will produce more of that same type of molecule, and molecules with the wrong "handedness" won't work at all in many biological systems. Because of that, most of the important chiral molecules on Earth, like amino acids, are all the same "handedness" as each other. But scientists don't know how the Earth came to favor particular varieties to start with. 

A cosmic handshake 

Researchers have found complex organic molecules on meteorites and comets, including chiral molecules which have shown a slight preference for one handedness over the other. Just a few percent excess "could be the tipping point that pushed life in a single direction, and that gave life the push it needed to, say, use only left-handed amino acids," Brandon Carroll, the work's other first author and a chemistry graduate student at California Institute of Technology, said at the conference. 

"But if we want to understand where and how this started, we have to go even further back than the meteorites; we have to look at the gas clouds where these molecules formed from," he added. 

In this case, they spotted a hefty dose of propylene oxide in distant interstellar space — about 80 percent Earth's mass, which at room temperature would take up five and a half earths' worth of space, Carroll said. 

If chiral materials had existed already in the cloud of gas and dust from which the solar system formed, or if they'd fallen to Earth on a meteorite or had been carried on a comet, that could explain Earth's preference — and also help explain the process of life's first formation on Earth. 

The researchers' measurements of the propylene oxide don't reveal which handedness the far-off molecules have; the data from the radio telescopes show only the composition, not how each molecule is put together. However, future work could try to determine that by watching how the molecules interact with polarized light, which corkscrews in a particular direction, the researchers said. 

"Now it gives us a testbed, some molecule we can actually go back and perform the far more complicated and challenging observations necessary to detect the handedness," Carroll said. "That's what we're really excited about, because that will let us start to test theories about processes that might actually have chiral preference in the interstellar medium." 

The new work was detailed June 14 in the journal Science. Read More 

[Image: B. Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF from data provided by N.E. Kassim, Naval Research Laboratory, Sloan Digital Sky Survey]