3I/ATLAS—the mysterious interstellar object that some believed was an alien artifact, but others knew was just a comet—is still being weird. Today’s newest bizarre finding is remarkable: the comet may be filled with large amounts of gaseous menthol and hydrogen cyanide, both considered crucial ingredients in the recipe for life.
Martin Cordiner, an astrochemist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and his team aimed the ALMA telescope at it, and they are credited with the finding. They published their findings in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper.
3I/ATLAS Is Loaded With Life-Friendly Chemicals. What COuld That Mean?
For context, in typical comets, these molecules appear only as faint traces. But 3I/ATLAS is apparently loaded with them. Methanol alone makes up a wild eight percent of all vapor coming off the comet. That’s about four times as much as anything we’ve measured from local comets.
Even weirder is that methanol is showing up in the comet’s rocky core and in its coma, the cloud surrounding the nucleus. This suggests some pretty complex chemistry inside the comet. Methanol is almost always around wherever there is some complex organic chemistry going on, mainly when it deals with the formation of life.
This all pairs neatly with an old idea that comets might be the perfect accidental delivery methods for seeding life… and it may have been how life was seeded here on Earth. Scientists plan to continue observing 3I/ATLAS as it loops around the Sun and heads back into space.
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