Comet Lovejoy Giving Away Alcohol (eurekalert.org)

Thorfinn.au writes: Comet Lovejoy lived up to its name by releasing large amounts of alcohol as well as a type of sugar into space, according to new observations by an international team. The discovery marks the first time ethyl alcohol, the same type in alcoholic beverages, has been observed in a comet. The finding adds to the evidence that comets could have been a source of the complex organic molecules necessary for the emergence of life.

'We found that comet Lovejoy was releasing as much alcohol as in at least 500 bottles of wine every second during its peak activity,' said Nicolas Biver of the Paris Observatory, France, lead author of a paper on the discovery published Oct. 23 in Science Advances. The team found 21 different organic molecules in gas from the comet, including ethyl alcohol and glycolaldehyde, a simple sugar.

Comets are frozen remnants from the formation of our solar system. Scientists are interested in them because they are relatively pristine and therefore hold clues to how the solar system was made. Most orbit in frigid zones far from the sun. However, occasionally, a gravitational disturbance sends a comet closer to the sun, where it heats up and releases gases, allowing scientists to determine its composition.

Comments

Re:I'm curious

[NixieBunny]

I work on telescopes of the sort that were used to make these observations. In fact, I built the spectrometer that the cited author Stephanie Milam used to get her degrees in astronomy at Arizona. The spectrometer (these days) is a big FFT machine capable of resolving perhaps 1 GHz of bandwidth into 16,384 or so channels. The frequency received by the telescope is typically many GHz. The huge IRAM telescope works at lower frequencies than our smaller scopes in Arizona, which operate above 100 GHz. The spectral lines are first replicated in a vacuum chamber in a lab, to make sure that the spectral signature is thoroughly documented.