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Physical Chemistry

ALMA’s First Look At Star Chemistry

ACS Meeting News: Astrochemists report on first data from the world’s largest radio telescope

by Jyllian Kemsley
March 30, 2015 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 93, Issue 13

This week’s selections are from the ACS national meeting, which took place on March 22–26 in Denver.
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Credit: Andrea Widener/C&EN
ALMA has 66 antennae that work together to obtain precise spectra of molecules in space.
ALMA has 66 antennas that work together to obtain precise spectra of molecules in space.
Credit: Andrea Widener/C&EN
ALMA has 66 antennae that work together to obtain precise spectra of molecules in space.

The world’s largest radio telescope, the $1.3 billion Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the Chilean Andes, is providing astrochemists with an unprecedented view of the molecules present as stars and planets form. ALMA’s 66 antennae allow researchers to obtain both better spectral sensitivity and better spatial resolution of molecular clouds as they coalesce into stars and planets. In particular, researchers have been able to home in on a protobinary star system in our galaxy and better resolve the surprisingly different chemical compounds around each star—one is richer in oxygen chemistry and the other has more nitrogen compounds. That might be because of a difference in the stars’ temperatures, said Ewine F. van Dishoeck of Leiden University, in the Netherlands. Additionally, the oxygen-chemistry-rich star appears to have ethylene glycol (HOCH2CH2OH), which is rare in the interstellar medium but abundant in comets in our solar system. That could indicate that Earth’s sun went through a similar formation process, van Dishoeck said.

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