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

Organic compounds in space

[CaptQuark]

It's interesting that they are finding organic compounds on comets. It's not much more complex to get to amino acids which are the building blocks of life. Perhaps the earth was seeded with enough organic material to jump start simple life forms. We might all be from alien origin.

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Re:Organic compounds in space

[arglebargle_xiv]

'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,

'On closer observation we found it to be ChÃteau Lafite Rothschild from somewhere between 1962 and 1978. The French government has authorised a French space mission to determine the vintage more closely, astronaut positions to be determined by national lottery', the scientist continued.

Re:Organic compounds in space

[tomhath]

Simple organic compounds are all over space. There's no reason to toss a few more out there; if a planet is in a life-friendly zone it probably already has the basic building block needed for life.

A simple conversion that the editors neglected

[stridebird]

We found that comet Lovejoy was releasing as much alcohol as in at least 500 bottles of wine every second during its peak activity

An angry person writes:

So how much ethyl alcohol? Using standard dimensions as assumptions:

500 bottles at 750ml: 375 litres
375 litres of wine at 13% = 50 litres [*]

Just say that next time, k? At what point in the reporting chain did this idiocy get introduced? It's ejecting around 50 litres of ethyl alcohol. Simple. Now go away.

[*} adjusted ABV from 12 to 13% to get 50 litres - a more likely estimated figure

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.