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Stars Found To Produce Complex Organic Compounds
InfiniteZero writes "Researchers at the University of Hong Kong observed stars at different evolutionary phases and found that they are able to produce complex organic compounds and eject them into space, filling the regions between stars. The compounds are so complex that their chemical structures resemble the makeup of coal and petroleum, the study's lead author Sun Kwok, of the University of Hong Kong, said."
That's all we need to know to get interstellar spaceflight up and going!
Free Gas, Next station 200 light years?
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
no its stargasm.. stop rooking..
This is just the fecies of space whales. They gotta poop to ya know!
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Maybe Joni Mitchell was right - we are stardust ater all!
So THAT's where the dinosaurs went 65 million years ago!
They built starships and flew into the sun!
We are all aliens, could be illegal too.
He said it best. We are made of star stuff!
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
The 'question' of how life started on our amazing planet gets easier to 'answer' with every new discovery.
"Just the facts, sir." (apologies to Sgt. Friday)
To me the facts are even more amazing and awesome than any myths or superstitions that persist, to explain our world and universe.
There are many times I feel humbled and awed by the scientific discoveries and technological advances I have witnessed in my lifetime. (reference: I'm coming up TOO QUICKLY! on 54 years old)
Just the amount and nature of 'former Sci-Fi' tech that has become reality in my time boggles my mind...Wow!
[disclaimer: yes, I did RTFA, please put away your torches and pitchforks] :-)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Forget fusion, the next source of energy is STAR POOP!!! Now, who do we send out to gather it?
Another new euphemism to use now, "brb, gotta dust the bathroom"
Stars are too hot for compounds to exist in them. The componds are actually synthesized in what TFA calls the circumstellar enviroment.
404: sig not found.
"... Nature is much more clever than we had imagined."
I'd say Dr. Kwok doesn't have enough imagination then, because it should have been pretty obvious.
Did anybody else find this name amusing within the context?
Just my first thought too but...
TFS is actually correct, as it is taken directly from the article.
And, no it don't says it produces it IN the star, but that the star produces it. That is, if the star produces the compounds around it, it is still the star that makes is, just not inside it.
So for a long long time in /. history, the summery is actually very correct :)
So finally we are sons of the starts ? Curious
So is that the real origin of Oil?
And methane also?
I can't wait for Fox News to bash the sun as a net-carbon-emitter.
This is clearly from wealthy extraterrestrials who cause space polar bears to drown and baby space seals to die.
One of them is manbearpig.
That brings into play the hotly debated Abiotic Oil theory. Conspiracy rumors have been the Deep Horizon disaster was based on BP hitting Abiotic oil and the pressure was too great for the faulty design and faulty materials used. Rumors also have been the Russians tapped into Abiotic oil during their deep drilling experiments. If this paper is correct that complex carbon chains are common in the universe, I'm wondering if the oil companies have known about it on Earth and didn't want to tell us about it till they got the price of crude high enough? That might explain the Liberty Rig that was erected about this time last year off the North Slope on a gravel island that was also known as Gull Island. Liberty Rig can drill 8 miles for slant drilling, that might be deep enough to hit Abiotic oil locked just at or just below the Earth's crust.
Well, that is the best news for the space program yet.
we don't build spaceships...we build oil tankers to go out into the void and return full with that natural petroleum goodness.
Thank the gods, now we can all go back to driving V-8s at 25 cents a gallon.
...that about wraps it up for God.
(Oolon Colluphid)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
We are the all-singing all-dancing crap of the world ^W stars.
Actually, some of the heavier elements only came about from supernovae (and even the lighter elements were only scattered about thanks to supernovae). Therefore, we are star debris!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
How "they" know that these chemicals aren't the result of organic processes? If a few thousand planets in the vicinity were ground up in a traffic jam after life formed, wouldn't we see something like this?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
"The compounds are so complex that their chemical structures resemble the makeup of coal and petroleum"
Who cares if it produced a little bit or even a lot of fuel like substances, could they have produced the organic matter needed to kick start life?
From what I understand the only real missing link in explaining how life started on this planet is the formation of some relatively simple organic compounds (not that they do not have some very good theories and promising results).
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
A book written a 20 years or so ago posited that the oil in the earth is not the remains of dinosaurs and plants but were the product of complex organic compounds present at the formation of the earth that terapascals of pressure had converted into our familiar liquid hydrocarbons. The author makes a pretty good case, including some empirical lab experiments, to back up this theory.
I personally find amazing the number of new data points that astrophysics is introducing.
And the summery is much to be preferred over the alternative, which is the wintery.
that it's the stars, and not
a) fumes from supernova watchers who got too close?
b) that anakin doesn't drive a hybrid?
c) from the pre-stellar phases of the star where it, presumably, must resemble a planet (with a solar-system sized ring system) at some point?
Then life must be everywhere in the universe!
If formation in the penumbra of stars is possible and common, :-)
what does that imply for the theory of abiotic formation of hydrocarbons,
as opposed to the theory that only transformation of dead plants/dinosaurs/etc
is responsible for hydrocarbond deposits in the earths crust?
Biotic sources probably IS responsible for some portion of that,
but could extra-terrestrial asteroids or internal terrestrial processes also be responsible?
The theory didnt seem to impact Russian hydrocarbon prospecting...
WHO KNOWS!? THATS SCIENCE!
Since when are coal or petroleum complex molecules? Coal is to varying degrees just carbon (the harder the coal, more it is just plain C) and petroleum is chains of Carbon with hydrogens haning off the sides. These are pretty simple molecules.
Don't tell me that Velikovsky was right after all! All that blarney about biblical "manna from heaven" being edible hydrocarbons released into the atmosphere by an interplanetary event?
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
So using petroleum is just a form of solar power. sweet. Im going to drive my solar powered car now. ;)
I'm horrified that this made it to Nature. It has certainly sealed my opinion that Nature publishes based more on name than content. Aside from nitpicky little things like leaving the structure such a horrible looking mess (when even my undergrads know how to use the clean-up tool in ChemDraw), why do they think that they can recreate a molecular structure from an IR spectrum obtained from a heterogeneous point source? Occam's Razor would suggest that this bizarrely complex structure isn't what they are actually seeing; they're seeing a population of less complex molecules whose signals are all added together.
Yuck.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Here is one of my bi-annual posts reminding all about Thomas Gold's theory about the abiological origin of natural gas, oil and/or coal (which we call "fossil" fuels, perhaps erroneously). He published a book about this: The Deep Hot Biosphere
One part of this theory has apparently become commonly accepted: "extremophiles" extend deep throughout the earth's crust. Cosmic hydrocarbons had already been observed in nebula, this new result appears to be another pointer in the same direction.
There's a certain kind of conservative that likes this theory-- see, we're not Running Out of Oil! The peakies are wrong!-- but there's no particular reason this would be good news for environmentalists. There may be enough hydrocarbons in the crust to completely combine with all the earth's oxygen...
I have empirical evidence that you don't need to be famous to do this... Given a large burrito, I too can "produce complex organic compounds and eject them into space, filling the regions between stars".
Americans, do you hear that?
"The compounds are so complex that their chemical structures resemble the makeup of coal and petroleum"
There is oil up there. Oil. OIL!
Now can you please start financing NASA moar so that they can do more cool stuff and let you keep driving your Chevy Tahoes?
~
yup...looks like Isis was in charge all along...time to close down the churches and the mosques and recycle the fanatics
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?