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.
Happy New Year!
Groan!
Run for your lives - the retards have taken over the thread.
RAmen!
Condensation reactions. Look it up in any intro organic text book.
Not only are the atoms natural, so are the bonds between them. The molecular arrangements are also determined strictly by the laws of nature. A C-C bond found in nature is identical to a C-C bond syntheized in the lab. The mere existence of a specific chemical indicates it is natural. The path to it's formation is irrelevant. For example, PCB's and dioxin were thought to be strictly synthetic until it was discovered that they formed in lightning strikes. The point is that chemistry is all natural for everything. Even in the lab, where the reactions are apparently controlled, the chemicals are simply the products of naturally occurring processess that will happen on their own. Reactions aren't made to happen by chemists. They happen through a set of chemical principles that function everywhere. Chemists simply know what the behavior of these materials are and let them do their own things. Chemicals do what they want to do and form what they want to form. Chemists simply know how these chemicals behave and use that to help create a tergeted chemical. What you call an unnatural chemical is still a part of nature and can form on its own under the proper circumstances. Even cooking your food produces thousands of by-product chemicals, almost all of which would be considered 'unnatural' by the organic food people. Acrylamide, a very toxic chemical, is one. Chemist don't engineer a chemical by snapping it together like Lego blocks.
What I'm rambling about is that all matter is natural simply because all matter exists in nature.
So you are dishonestly conflating the fact that humans design microbes ("Hey! That is ID!")with the pseudo-scientific hypothesis of ID ("An unknown agent with unknown motivations and powers designed life on earth") too. Glad we've sorted that out. At least you'll be taking issue with the numbskulls who claim that if humans can't do intelligent design of life in the laboratory that disproves evolution. It is just amusing to see how the creationist argument is reversing as science progresses from the old argument, "The failure of scientists to design life disproves evolution" to "The (hypothetical) success of scientists in designing life would support alternative theories to evolution". Don't you get it? Whether or not human scientists are capable of "intelligently designing" life in laboratories has zip, zilch, nada, zero, nothing to do with whether or not the conjecture that life on earth was originally intelligently designed.
No difference.
Have you ever overinflated a bicycle tire (about 60 psi)?
Commercial tanks are pressurized to 2500-3000 psi. Should the valve crack off -- that suckers going to move.
This is NASA. They have made a SWAG.
LOL. You seem to be saying that anything following the words "theory of" is pretty much guess work.
Talk to me, then, about this theory of intelligent design.
Anything that can happen in reality can be said to be "natural" in some sense or another. But when that strict sense is used, the word has no meaning, because something that means everything ends up meaning nothing. The term, as most people understand it, implies a lack of intelligent involvement in a particular process.
I'll talk to you about a "theory of intelligent design" just as soon as you point out where i ever claimed ID is a theory.
I have never claimed that it is a theory. Both ID/creation are evolution are "scientific models". They are guesses about which people on both sides present evidence both for their position and against the other.
Since neither of them are testable/repeatable, neither can truly be considered a theory.
To say that evolution is a theory is an attempt to lend credibility to the subject that simply is not supported by the evidence. Even evolutionists admit that evolution (we're talking macro-evoloution and not micro0evolution) is not a fact.
I find it humorous that evolutionists compare evolution with gravity, when it is quite simple to observe the effects of gravity. No one has observed the effects of macro-evolution. if they had, their Nobel Prize awaits.
What you're doing is conflating scientific-vs-unscientific with correct-vs-incorrect. The fact that humans engage in ID does not provide evidence for the correctness of the ID theory, and no one's claiming that it does. That's your strawman.
That is wrong. The word natural in the sense that scientists use it is exclusive of the supernatural. ie the mystical involvement of incomprehensible entities with incomprehensible powers. Hardly a meaningless distinction.
The term, as most people understand it, implies a lack of intelligent involvement in a particular process.
But "most people" are not scientists.
And "supernatural" is another one of your strawmen. Find any published definition of ID theory by ID advocates that says a "supernatural" power is responsible for the origin of life. It's simply not a scientific term at all.
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