A team led by researchers at MIT has discovered that a distant interstellar cloud contains an abundance of pyrene, a type of large, carbon-containing molecule known as a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH).
The discovery of pyrene in this far-off cloud, which is similar to the collection of dust and gas that eventually became our own solar system, suggests that pyrene may have been the source of much of the carbon in our solar system.
That hypothesis is also supported by a recent finding that samples returned from the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu contain large quantities of pyrene.
Due to its symmetry, pyrene itself is invisible to the radio astronomy techniques that have been used to detect about 95 percent of molecules in space.
The molecule was detected in a distant cloud known as TMC-1, using the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope (GBT), a radio telescope at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.
McGuire and Ilsa Cooke, an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of British Colombia, are the senior authors of a paper describing the findings, which appears in Science.