Methanol has long been considered a basic building block of life as we know it: the molecule plays a crucial role in producing the proteins and amino acids that make up DNA and RNA, upon which all known life is based.
Its discovery in other parts of the solar system — and even planet-forming discs around distant stars — has therefore been met with immense excitement by the scientific community.
Now, add another intriguing location where scientists have detected the fascinating molecule: in recent readings from 3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar object cruising through our solar system ever to be identified in history.
As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center astrochemist Martin Cordiner and his colleagues used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to scan the object, finding not just traces but significant amounts of both gaseous methanol and hydrogen cyanide, which is also considered an important precursor for the formation of life.
The sheer concentration of the gases caught them off guard on the interstellar visitor, which is widely believed to be a type of comet.
“Molecules like hydrogen cyanide and methanol are at trace abundances and not the dominant constituents of our own comets,” Cordiner told New Scientist. “Here we see that, actually, in this alien comet they’re very abundant.”
Considering methanol’s important role in the production of key molecules that are essential for the formation of life, it’s an intriguing finding. The findings also suggest that other important types of chemical reactions could be taking place as well.
“It seems really chemically implausible that you could go on a path to very high chemical complexity without producing methanol,” Cordiner told New Scientist.
By examining the ALMA data, the scientists concluded that both methanol and hydrogen cyanide gas came from 3I/ATLAS’ rocky core. However, methanol also appeared in significant concentrations in the visitor’s coma, the fuzzy blanket of gas and dust around a comet’s nucleus.
They found that around eight percent of the total vapor emanating from 3I/ATLAS was made up of methanol, roughly four times as much as in more familiar solar system comets.
The production rates for both molecules are “among the most enriched values measured in any comet,” they wrote in their paper.
“Observing campaigns targeting the comet near perihelion and as its angular distance from the Sun increases post-perihelion will doubtless provide further clues into the composition of this visitor from another star,” the scientists added.
The findings could support the theory that objects like 3I/ATLAS may have once brought life to Earth billions of years ago, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb — who has long championed the far-fetched theory that the visitor is an alien mothership visiting the solar system — posited in a new blog post.
“The anomalously large ratio of methanol to hydrogen-cyanide production by 3I/ATLAS suggests a friendly nature for this interstellar visitor,” Loeb wrote — a “friendly interstellar gardener” and not a “deadly threat.”
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