A team of scientists from different countries, led by Alice Booth of the Leiden University in the Netherlands, have found methanol-ijs inside the warm part of a planet-forming disk. The methanol cannot be produced there and could be coming from the cold gas clouds that form stars and disks. If this is a common phenomenon then it could be a breakthrough discovery. The findings will be published in Nature Astronomy.
Methanol is of the simplest complex molecules and is believed to be a predecessor for the pre-biotic chemistry required for life. It can be used to form proteins and amino acids. Scientists already have evidence of methanol in one cold planet-forming disk around a close star and in the cold gas clouds produced from stars. This is the first time a big reservoir of methanol has been found in a warm planet-forming disk.
Formation chemically impossible
As mentioned, it is chemically impossible for methanol to form in the warm disk; the researchers, therefore, believe that the methanol ice was already present on the dust grains in the cold gas cloud that’s behind the formation of the star and disk.
“This is a very exciting and surprising result. Whilst warm methanol has been detected in the warm, young disks, because of the nature of this disk this is the first clear observational evidence that complex organic molecules can be ‘inherited’ from the earlier cold dark clouds phase,” said research leader Alice Booth.
10 million-year-old disk
The observations were made on the planet-forming disk around the HD 100546 star. The researchers found that the disk is around 10 million years old and is 360 light-years away from our planet.
Using the ALMA observatory, the scientists were looking for the simple molecule sulfur monoxide, but also detected methanol lines. The team hopes to gather more data to observe the methanol lines at higher spatial resolution.
Recently, scientists also found a spaghettified star for the first time. They discovered a distant star wrapped around a supermassive black hole, a process called “spaghettification.” The study was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
