One of the most surprising scientific news in recent years was the discovery of a sugar molecule 400 light years from Earth. That was possible thanks to the ALMA telescope array. But the logical question ishow do we know that this molecule is sugar if it is so far away?
The finding is surprising because it’s hard to imagine being able to see something at least 100 times smaller than a grain of sugar at that distance. To give us an idea, if we could reduce the distance a trillion times, it would be like seeing a grain of sugar that is in Tarragona… while we are in A Coruña. Only that the grain of sugar would be more than a trillion times smaller.
Thanks to this discovery, we know that some of the chemical components necessary for life to begin exist in our galaxy when planets begin to form, and this is what, in the words of Jes Jorgensen, one of the scientists involved in the discovery “Could it tell us how life starts on other planets? and the observations with ALMA will be vital for this”.
The ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submilimiter Array) is a set of 66 radio telescopes located in northern Chile. The scientists who work there detected, in 2012, a molecule of glycolaldehyde (a simple form of sugar), in a star called IRAS 16293-2422, 400 light years from our planet.
“In the disk of gas surrounding this newly formed star, we have found glycolaldehyde,” explains Jorgensen. This molecule is one of the ingredients in the formation of RNAwhich, together with DNA, to which it is related, is one of the building blocks of life”.
While some telescopes use an instrument that, like a prism, “splits” the light into different colors of the light spectrum, like a rainbow, ALMA analyzes radio waves, which are treated in the same way as light waves. light: when they reach us after traversing great distances, they bring with them the traces of what they came across. This is how they manage to detect something so tiny, but at the same time so far away.
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