October 31, 2024
Education News Canada

UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
New space molecule largest ever detected using radioastronomy

October 25, 2024

An asteroid has helped researchers discover the largest molecule ever detected by radioastronomy, and the third-largest identified in space.

The discovery, published today (October 24) in Science, provides further clues to an astrochemical mystery: Where does carbon, the building block of life, come from and go to in the universe, including in our own solar system?

Researchers detected pyrene, a type of large carbon-containing molecule known as a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH), in the Taurus molecular cloud a stellar nursery that is relatively close to Earth at only 430 light years away, or about four quadrillion kilometres (that's 15 zeroes).

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