‘Essential To Life’ Methanol Discovered In Nearby Planet-Forming-Disc For First Time

The protoplanetary disc surrounding new born star TW Hydrae is the nearest known planet forming disc from our planet. Now researchers have reportedly discovered methyl alcohol, or methanol, an essential to life organic molecule in the gaseous disc. This is the first time that methanol has been detected in a protoplanetary disc.

An international team of scientists discovered the signs of gaseous methanol surrounding TW Hydrae, located at distance of about 170 light years away, with the help of Chile's Atacama large Millimeter/Submillimeter (ALMA) telescope. Methyl alcohol was found on the protoplanetary disc's minute dust grains, from which the researchers felt it was released in gaseous form.

"Methanol in gaseous form in the disc is an unambiguous indicator of rich organic chemical processes at an early stage of star and planet formation," said Ryan A. Loomis, researcher from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "The result has an effect on our understanding of how organic matter accumulates in very young planetary systems".

According to the scientists, the discovery of methanol which is an essential formative agent for organic life in protoplanetary disc could help in learning more about the molecules themselves. Apart from detecting methyl alcohol, the researchers also discovered that its distribution within the disc of gaseous cloud makes a ring like design. The phenomenon made the scientists speculate that the ring was created when the bigger dust grains in the icy mass separated from the gas, and began to drift inside towards the TW Hydrae due to its gravitational pull.

Recently, another important building block of life on Earth was detected in space, namely chiral molecules. According to reports, though the detection of methanol or chiral molecules is not the same as discovering extraterrestrial life, but it makes the case stronger for essential to life molecules being present outside the solar system. In addition, the discovery of methanol in cold gas phase in a protoplanetary disc indicates that ice chemistry products can be investigated in discs, which creates new avenues for analyzing complex organic chemistry during the formation of planetary system.