First Chemistry Data From World’s Largest Radio Telescope

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.

Ewine F. van Dishoeck of Leiden University in the Netherlands presented some preliminary results from ALMA on Wednesday in the Division of Physical Chemistry at the American Chemical Society national meeting in Denver.

ALMA’s 66 antennae allow researchers to obtain both better spectral sensitivity and spatial resolution of molecular clouds as they coalesce into stars and planets. In particular, researchers led by Jes Jørgensen of the University of Copenhagen 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, whereas the other has more nitrogen compounds. That might be because of a difference in the stars’ temperatures, van Dishoeck said.

Additionally, the oxygen-chemistry-rich star also 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 our sun went through a similar formation process, van Dishoeck said.

The spatial resolution of the ALMA data is particularly exciting for studying planetary formation, commented Els Peeters, an astronomist at the University of Western Ontario and the SETI Institute. “We’ll really be able to get into unexplored territory” by being able to differentiate the location of molecules as well as identifying ones that researchers couldn’t previously detect, she said.