Posted on 12/31/2005 1:32:58 AM PST by neverdem
Partial Ingredients For DNA And Protein Found Around Star NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered some of life's most basic ingredients in the dust swirling around a young star. The ingredients - gaseous precursors to DNA and protein - were detected in the star's terrestrial planet zone, a region where rocky planets such as Earth are thought to be born.
The findings represent the first time that these gases, called acetylene and hydrogen cyanide, have been found in a terrestrial planet zone outside of our own.
"This infant system might look a lot like ours did billions of years ago, before life arose on Earth," said Fred Lahuis of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands and the Dutch space research institute called SRON. Lahuis is lead author of a paper to be published in the Jan. 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Lahuis and his colleagues spotted the organic, or carbon-containing, gases around a star called IRS 46. The star is in the Ophiuchus (pronounced OFF-ee-YOO-kuss), or "snake carrier," constellation about 375 light-years from Earth. This constellation harbors a huge cloud of gas and dust in the process of a major stellar baby boom. Like most of the young stars here and elsewhere, IRS 46 is circled by a flat disk of spinning gas and dust that might ultimately clump together to form planets.
When the astronomers probed this star's disk with Spitzer's powerful infrared spectrometer instrument, they were surprised to find the molecular "barcodes" of large amounts of acetylene and hydrogen cyanide gases, as well as carbon dioxide gas. The team observed 100 similar young stars, but only one, IRS 46, showed unambiguous signs of the organic mix.
"The star's disk was oriented in just the right way to allow us to peer into it," said Lahuis.
The Spitzer data also revealed that the organic gases are hot. So hot, in fact, that they are most likely located near the star, about the same distance away as Earth is from our sun.
"The gases are very warm, close to or somewhat above the boiling point of water on Earth," said Dr. Adwin Boogert of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "These high temperatures helped to pinpoint the location of the gases in the disk."
Organic gases such as those found around IRS 46 are found in our own solar system, in the atmospheres of the giant planets and Saturn's moon Titan, and on the icy surfaces of comets. They have also been seen around massive stars by the European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory, though these stars are thought to be less likely than sun-like stars to form life-bearing planets.
Here on Earth, the molecules are believed to have arrived billions of years ago, possibly via comets or comet dust that rained down from the sky. Acetylene and hydrogen cyanide link up together in the presence of water to form some of the chemical units of life's most essential compounds, DNA and protein. These chemical units are several of the 20 amino acids that make up protein and one of the four chemical bases that make up DNA.
"If you add hydrogen cyanide, acetylene and water together in a test tube and give them an appropriate surface on which to be concentrated and react, you'll get a slew of organic compounds including amino acids and a DNA purine base called adenine," said Dr. Geoffrey Blake of Caltech, a co-author of the paper. "And now, we can detect these same molecules in the planet zone of a star hundreds of light-years away."
Follow-up observations with the W.M. Keck Telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii confirmed the Spitzer findings and suggested the presence of a wind emerging from the inner region of IRS 46's disk. This wind will blow away debris in the disk, clearing the way for the possible formation of Earth-like planets.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech. JPL is a division of Caltech. Spitzer's infrared spectrograph was built by Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. Its development was led by Dr. Jim Houck of Cornell.
For graphics and more information about Spitzer, visit http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer . For more information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit http://www.nasa.gov/home/ .
Editor's Note: The original news release can be found here.
This story has been adapted from a news release issued by National Aeronautics And Space Administration.
I said "limit" to the courts' authority. I didn't say that they were arguing that the court had no jurisdiction at all.
Furthermore, I'd be careful about arguing that that is unlike an organization trying to get courts to mandate that which "... would never get anywhere at all through the political process" -- considering that the ALL the ID advocates on the Dover School Board up for re-election in Novemeber were beaten.
Why should I be "careful" about arguing this? When were the ID'ers trying to get the courts to mandate anything? They were aguing against having it mandate something. Can you really not see the vast difference between that and the way leftist groups use the courts?
If they sincerely wanted to stay out of court, they would have have dropped the ID policy right there
In other words, surrendered. You really think they wouldn't have been perfectly happy if they'd been able to proceed with the curriculum without the court getting involved at all, subject only to the approval or disapproval of the people of the town?
That's very prescient. Oh, and by the way, I suspect that the judge will rule in favor of the Dover school board. >:-D
We're already here. You're the one who is late. Any why the insults?
Happy New Year anyway.
Coyote
Thanks for the ping!
(redundancy error noted)
Maybe just a fail-safe backup system?
"Repetitive redundancy"...
Cheers!
Cheers!
...oh, and happy new year. :-)
Happy New Year!
Only visible light is "seeable". For others, there are tools(I forgot what they are called, but read in my intro Astronomy).
We haven't "produced" a sun, a star, or a supernovae either. But they sure are explained by science(gas clouds -> gravity -> critical mass -> kaboom -> burn baby burn -> run out of fuel eventually -> outward expansion and core contraction).
Can you imagine what Bart Simpson would do if he got ahold of one of those babies?
Full Disclosure: Probably urban legend, but one of my undergrad profs told me of the time of those gas cylinders (not acetylene) got knocked on its side. Somehow the cap got damaged, or the valve broke off. The entire cylinder took off like a torpedo (think a normal children's balloon when you let go of the end) and punched a hole in the wall of the building!
Cheers!
All chemicals are natural. They are all the product of chemical reactions that occur of their own accord according to chemical principles. A chemical found in a living thing is indistinguishable from the same chemical synthesized in a flask. They are completely identical. Both are natural. To say otherwise implies that there is some strange, supoernatural occurrence in the lab that does not happen in the real world. No one designed these chemicals - they are all the result of natural processess.
The law requires welding tanks to be chained down so they don't rocket through the shed. They will fly. Another thing: don't grease the fittings on the oxygen tank. If the fittings are getting hard to tighten, replace them.
No urban legend. Gas cylinders are under high pressure and will shoot off like a rocket if the valve is knocked off. There are many cases of this happening when cylinders are not strsapped down during storage, use or transport. They can go through multiple cement block walls if they go in a straight line, but they tend to spin and bounce around because the valve breaks are rarelt symmetric. People have even been killed by home CO2 fire extinghuishers when they accidentally drop them and the valve breaks and they go off like mini-rockets.
Remember, 2nd hand info to me, and 3rd hand to you...
This was not a welding tank, but (IIRC) nitrogen.
And it happened while the tanks were being swapped out.
Cheers!
The particular gas in the tank wouldn't be important. Argon is common in wire welding. An argon tank would fly as well as an oxygen tank.
The atoms are natural. The molecular arrangements aren't all necessarily naturally-occurring.
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