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Loading contentHow the rich chemistry of the cold clouds between the stars — water, alcohols, and the rings of carbon that carry the galaxy's soot — is built atom by atom and inherited by every new star, planet, and comet. Built on real molecules and observations; nothing is fabricated.
Cold, dense clouds of molecular hydrogen and dust, dark and shielded from starlight, where nearly all the interstellar molecules reside and where stars are born. They are the richest chemical factories in the galaxy, mapped in the millimetre and submillimetre.
A key complex organic molecule that forms not in the gas but on the icy surfaces of dust grains, by the step-by-step addition of hydrogen to frozen carbon monoxide. It is a stepping stone toward the larger organic molecules found around young stars.
The astrochemistry of molecules relevant to the origin of life — how the building blocks of biology can be assembled in interstellar clouds, on icy grains, and in the young Solar System, and delivered to a planet's surface.
After molecular hydrogen, the most abundant molecule in space — and, because hydrogen is hard to see directly in cold gas, the workhorse tracer astronomers use to map molecular clouds and measure how much gas is available to form stars.