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Since 1965 more than 140 molecular species have been detected in space, in interstellar clouds. A large fraction of these molecules is organic or carbon-based. A lot of attention is given to the quest for so-called bio-molecules, especially interstellar amino acids. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and therefore key ingredients for the origin of life, have been found in meteorites on Earth, but not yet in interstellar space.

Now scientists have detected a new molecule in space closely related to an amino acid: amino acetonitrile. The organic molecule was found with a 30-meter radio telescope in Spain and two radio interferometers in France and Australia in the Large Molecule Heimat, a giant gas cloud near the galactic center in the constellation Sagittarius. In this source of only 0.3 light-year diameter, which is heated by a deeply embedded newly formed star, most of the interstellar molecules known to date have been found, including the most complex ones such as ethyl alcohol, formaldehyde, formic acid, acetic acid, glycol aldehyde and ethylene glycol.

Stars:

The other day I looked out my window and I could see the ‘dark side’ of the moon really well. The Moon was a whopper, swollen by the well-known illusion that makes moons near the horizon seem big. But that wasn’t what grabbed my attention. The wonderful thing was the way the “dark” part of the Moon was faintly glowing. The phase of the Earth changes reciprocally with the moon, so the illumination is greater for thin crescent moons; and specular reflection off the oceans increases the brightness of a near-full Earth in the moon’s sky. The brightness of the sky also has an effect: it can easily drown out the subtle illumination of earthshine. So for thin crescents, there’s a trade-off with the position of the sun below the horizon.

Stars: