Carbon concentration in the cosmos

Scientists have discovered the presence in space of a class of molecules that store a lot of carbon; It is estimated that this chemical compound is the main carbon store in the cosmic environment.

The discovery was made following the detection of pyrene in large quantities, through one of its derivatives, in a distant interstellar cloud.

Pyrene is one of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons known mostly by its English acronym, PAH.

The discovery was made by a team including, among others, Gabi Wenzel and Brett McGuire, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.

The discovery of pyrene in this distant cloud, which is similar to the collection of dust and gas that eventually became our solar system, suggests that pyrene may have been the source of much of the carbon in our solar system. This hypothesis is also supported by the recent discovery that samples taken from the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu contain large amounts of pyrene.

Because of its symmetry, pyrene itself is invisible to radio astronomy techniques that have been used to detect about 95 percent of the chemicals present in space. Instead of trying to detect it directly, the researchers looked for, and detected, an isomer of cyanopyrene (a version of pyrene that has reacted with cyanide, losing its symmetry). This chemical compound was detected in a distant cloud known as TMC-1, using the 100-meter GBT radio telescope, located at the Green Bank astronomical observatory, in West Virginia, United States.

Gabi Wenzel (left) and Brett McGuire. (Photo: Bryce Vickmark / MIT. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

The study is titled “Detection of interstellar 1-cyanopyrene: a four-ring polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon.” And it has been published in the academic journal Science. (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)