Awesome find! James Webb Telescope discovers building blocks of life in cloud, says NASA

Mankind has been in search of potential planets which could support life one day should the need to ever leave Earth arise. Although there are more planets in the Universe than you could ever imagine, they all have one substance missing which makes our Blue Planet so unique – Water, which is the elixir of life behind every living being on planet Earth. Although it is one of the building blocks of life, a habitable planet is made up of several key elements. They are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur, commonly referred to as CHONS.

For life to exist, essential molecular ingredients of life are formed in dense molecular clouds which incorporate into planet-forming regions of disks as the time goes on. Now a team of astronomers, with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, has discovered the fundamental building blocks of life in a molecular cloud. It has obtained an in-depth inventory of the deepest, coldest ices measured to date in a molecular cloud. In addition to water, the team was able to identify frozen forms of molecules such as carbonyl sulfide, ammonia, and methane and methanol. The results of the study were published in the January 23 edition of the issue of Nature Astronomy.

What researchers say

Melissa McClure, an astronomer at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, the principal investigator of the observing program and lead author of the paper said in a NASA blog, “Our results provide insights into the initial, dark chemistry stage of the formation of ice on the interstellar dust grains that will grow into the centimeter-sized pebbles from which planets form in disks.

“These observations open a new window on the formation pathways for the simple and complex molecules that are needed to make the building blocks of life,” she added further.

In addition to the above-mentioned molecules, the team of researchers also found molecules which are more complex than methanol. According to NASA, this proves that complex molecules form in the icy depths of molecular clouds before stars are born.