Oh no, you're thinking, yet another cookie pop-up. Well, sorry, it's the law. We measure how many people read us, and ensure you see relevant ads, by storing cookies on your device. If you're cool with that, hit “Accept all Cookies”. For more info and to customize your settings, hit “Customize Settings”.

Review and manage your consent

Here's an overview of our use of cookies, similar technologies and how to manage them. You can also change your choices at any time, by hitting the “Your Consent Options” link on the site's footer.

Manage Cookie Preferences
  • These cookies are strictly necessary so that you can navigate the site as normal and use all features. Without these cookies we cannot provide you with the service that you expect.

  • These cookies are used to make advertising messages more relevant to you. They perform functions like preventing the same ad from continuously reappearing, ensuring that ads are properly displayed for advertisers, and in some cases selecting advertisements that are based on your interests.

  • These cookies collect information in aggregate form to help us understand how our websites are being used. They allow us to count visits and traffic sources so that we can measure and improve the performance of our sites. If people say no to these cookies, we do not know how many people have visited and we cannot monitor performance.

See also our Cookie policy and Privacy policy.

This article is more than 1 year old

Boffins discover chemistry that could have produced building blocks of life in space

My god, it's full of hydrocarbons

A team of researchers carried out a series of experiments to study how complex hydrocarbons, an important class of molecules needed to create the building blocks for life, formed in space.

Hydrocarbons, compounds made up of differing amounts of carbon and hydrogen, are common on Earth but also outside it. Some hydrocarbons, such as benzene or naphthalene, have been detected in meteorites floating around the solar system, leading scientists to wonder how they might have formed.

Now, a paper published in Nature Astronomy on Monday provides a possible answer. Researchers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, University of California, Berkeley and Florida International University, have recreated pyrene, a hydrocarbon commonly formed during the combustion processes in car engines, in a lab.

Musahid Ahmed, co-author of the paper and a chemist at UC Berkeley, said: “Starting off from simple gases, you can generate one-dimensional and two-dimensional structures, and pyrene could lead you to 2-D graphene. From there you can get to graphite, and the evolution of more complex chemistry begins."

A pressurised mixture of 4-phenanthrenyl - a hydrocarbon with one unpaired electron - another hydrocarbon compound acetylene were injected into a microreactor from a nozzle at supersonic speeds.

Next, a beam of UV light was directed at the gas to ionise the mixture and simulate similar conditions to those found around a star. The loss of electrons kickstarts a series of reactions that eventually create pyrene. Since it requires other hydrocarbons to make pyrene, it doesn’t quite explain how the first hydrocarbons were created.

But, Ahmed, said he believes this process could explain how “some of the first carbon-based structures evolved in the universe".

Pyrene is part of a larger chemical group known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) that are estimated to make up about 20 per cent of all carbon in the Milky Way. PAHs are composed of ring structures that are found in interstellar dust grains, leftover material flung from stars. They provide a chemical pathway for amino acids, peptides and sugars, some of the essential ingredients for life, to form.

Ralf Kaiser, co-author of the paper and an astrochemistry professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, explained to The Register that PAHs provide surfaces for other molecules like water, ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide or methanol to condense on.

“Molecules from the gas phase can condense on the cold grains - it's similar when water ice builds up in your ice box from the water in the air.”

After these molecules build up on PAHs like pyrene, if they’re exposed to ionizing radiation it can fire up another series of reactions to create amino acids, peptides and sugars.

The next step is to find out if these life-bearing molecules can be formed from ionising a mixture of hydrocarbon gases. "Is this enough of a trigger? There has to be some self-organization and self-assembly involved to create life forms. The big question is whether this is something that, inherently, the laws of physics do allow," Ahmed concluded. ®

Similar topics

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like