Researchers led by Arnaud Belloche, of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, have detected fully deuterated methanol in space for the first time, a form of the molecule in which all the hydrogen atoms are replaced by deuterium. It is also the first detection of an interstellar molecule with four deuterium atoms.
The discovery was made with the ALMA radio telescope in Chile, as part of a programme that observed eleven young star systems. The molecule was found around the protostar IRAS4A2, in the Perseus molecular cloud, about a thousand light years from Earth.
This form of methanol is around 100 times more abundant than chemical models predict, suggesting those models are missing an important formation process. Because deuterated molecules form mainly in very cold conditions, they help explain how chemical complexity passes from interstellar clouds to planetary systems.
The study was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, together with six other papers from the same observation programme.
