LEXINGTON, Va. (WFXR) — The Virginia Military Institute has announced an out-of-this-world discovery by an assistant professor and research team studying molecules in a deep space cloud within the Milky Way.
(Photo Credit: Virginia Military Institute)
The research team is responsible for the discovery of three new molecules observed in space described as molecules 1-, 2- and 4-cyanopyrene.
(Photo Credit: Gabi Wenzel, Ilsa R. Cooke, Brett A. McGuire; MIT)
Major Shingledecker and his team worked on project GOTHAM, led by Shingledecker’s colleague and friend with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Department of Chemistry, Brett McGuire, Ph.D. The project used data from a 100-meter radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia known as the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT).
(Photo Credit: Virginia Military Institute)
Shingledecker explained that until the 1940s, scientists didn’t believe molecules could exist in space.
“The belief was that there were just atoms floating around and that nothing as fragile as a chemical bond could survive,” said Shingledecker. “If a molecule did have the audacity to form, the idea was that ultraviolet light from stars would break it apart. Only in the post-World War II era did astronomers begin to realize the tremendous variety of molecules that exist in space. Amazingly, we now know of over 200.”
The GOTHAM team studied a molecular cloud located hundreds of light years away from Earth called the Taurus Molecular Cloud 1 (TMC-1). TMC-1 is a mixture of stardust, gas, and other molecules including PAHs, but mostly hydrogen.
“Understanding the chemistry of molecular clouds could one day shed light on how life began on Earth. We now know that comets and asteroids contain many of the molecular building blocks of life, such as amino acids and nucleobases. We suspect that these molecules may have initially formed in molecular clouds similar to TMC-1, which can go on to form solar systems like ours. From studying Earth and our own solar system, it is likely that there was a period billions of years ago when comets and asteroids hit the surface much more frequently than they do today, and planets around other stars almost certainly experience something very similar. Given what we now know about the presence of the molecular building blocks of life in comets and asteroids, it’s not hard to imagine the first organisms forming when some of those molecules encounter the right conditions on a young planet,” Shingledecker speculated.
The GOTHAM team looks especially for so-called “aromatic” molecules in space. According to Shingledecker, the abundance of carbon atoms in space implies that “if there’s life elsewhere in the universe, then there’s a good chance that it’s also carbon-based.”
“As the name suggests, these molecules sometimes have strong aromas, but in every case, if you look at the molecular structure, you’ll see one or more rings of carbon atoms. These are interesting from both an astronomical and a chemistry point of view,” said Shingledecker. “For example, if you look at the molecules which make up living things on Earth, you see these ring-like structures frequently, while in space we believe that up to 10% to 25% of all the carbon in the universe is in these multi-ring molecules which we call polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).”
Shingledecker received his doctorate from the University of Virginia (UVA) and has been a faculty member at VMI since August.
The research article in Science may be viewed here. The research article in Nature Astronomy may be viewed here.