Recently in the Astrochemistry Category

It is not known whether the original carriers of Earth's nitrogen were molecular ices or refractory dust.

Water trapped in dust grains from which the Earth formed can explain the current large amount of water on Earth.

A possible surface type that may form in the environments of M-dwarf planets is sodium chloride dihydrate, or "hydrohalite" (NaCl 2H2O), which can precipitate in bare sea ice at low temperatures.

The ALMA telescope in Chile has transformed how we see the universe, showing us otherwise invisible parts of the cosmos.

Given that the macromolecular building blocks of life were likely produced photochemically in the presence of ultraviolet (UV) light, we identify some general constraints on which stars produce sufficient UV for this photochemistry.

Molecules with an amide functional group resemble peptide bonds, the molecular bridges that connect amino acids, and may thus be relevant in processes that lead to the formation of life.

In addition to long-lived radioactive nuclei like U and Th isotopes, which have been used to measure the age of the Galaxy, also radioactive nuclei with half-lives between 0.1 and 100 million years (short-lived radionuclides, SLRs) were present in the early Solar System (ESS), as indicated by high-precision meteoritic analysis.

In 1924, Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin claimed that life on Earth developed through gradual chemical changes of organic molecules, in the "primordial soup" which likely existed on Earth four billion years ago.

The formation of asteroids, comets and planets occurs in the interior of protoplanetary disks during the early phase of star formation.

It is thought that dicyanopolyynes could be potentially abundant interstellar molecules, although their lack of dipole moment makes it impossible to detect them through radioastronomical techniques.