Starship Asterisk*

Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF

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Astronomers acting on a hunch have likely resolved a mystery about young, still-forming stars and regions rich in organic molecules closely surrounding some of them. They used the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to reveal one such region that previously had eluded detection, and that revelation answered a longstanding question.

The regions around the young protostars contain complex organic molecules that can further combine into prebiotic molecules that are the first steps on the road to life. The regions, dubbed “hot corinos” by astronomers, are typically about the size of our Solar System and are much warmer than their surroundings, though still quite cold by terrestrial standards.

The first hot corino was discovered in 2003, and only about a dozen have been found so far. Most of these are in binary systems, with two protostars forming simultaneously.

Astronomers have been puzzled by the fact that, in some of these binary systems, they found evidence for a hot corino around one of the protostars but not the other. ...

• Astrophysical Journal Letters 896(1):L3 (2020 Jun 10) DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab8d41