James Webb finds exotic carbon compound

A team of international scientists has used the James Webb Space Telescope to detect a new carbon compound in deep space for the first time. It’s the substance “methyl cation”, or CH3+ - and it was traced back to a young star system, catchily called d203-506, 1350 light-years away from Earth. David Whitehouse is a space scientist and author and a regular contributor here on the Naked Scientists.

David - It's a very special compound because interstellar chemists and the people who study the chemistry of very early stars and their environment have wanted to find CH3+ plus for many years. In fact many decades. But it hasn't really been possible until now because where they found it is in a disc around a very young, very small star called a red dwarf, a circumstellar disc which contains lots of the material that's going to form planets eventually. And in the past, the only way you could really tell if there were interesting molecules in a circumstellar disc is to use a radio telescope. You detect various spectrum lines in the radio spectrum. But the thing about CH3 is that you can't see it in the radio. It shines in the infrared region spectrum. And this is ideal for the James Webb Space Telescope. So they looked at this very young red dwarf star, which is 20% the size of the sun, with its circumstellar disc. And they were able to see in the infrared spectrum the exquisite precision that this telescope has. They were able to see the telltale signs of CH3+, ending a decades long search for this outside the solar system

Chris - Is this sort of two things then. One, a proof of concept the James Webb really can deliver and it can see these things in unprecedented detail. But secondly, presumably seeing this and being able to see it with the resolution they now can enable us to put to the test some of our theories about how these sorts of chemicals evolve and develop in a forming system. And that in turn informs how they get where they are and what they turn into. Because they're building blocks of other more complicated molecules, aren't they in more mature systems like ours?

David - That's right. The interesting thing about methyl cation ion is that it's a carbon molecule and carbon is the most friendly molecule in the universe because it teams up with other carbon atoms and other atoms and forms long chains. And it does this far better than any other element in the universe. So if you're going to have the synthesis of very interesting carbon based molecules in these circumstellar discs that perhaps might survive to get onto the surfaces of very young planets and start the process of life, you really have to find CH3+ in the circumstellar discs because it is root of all the interesting chemistry that you could have there. So this was needed to be there because we've detected other molecules in circumstellar discs and indeed in gas clouds and stellar nurseries in space, which are, if you like, based on CH3+ having connected up with other carbon molecules. But we've never detected the root, if you like, of this process. So it shows us that we really do understand how important, interesting, and complex carbon-based molecules can actually be formed around a young star. Now whether or not those molecules survive when the star perhaps gets brighter or survive when the circumstellar disc turns into planets. And then seeds these planets with very interesting chemicals that can perhaps go on further to develop life is an interesting scenario. But finding this, since we knew it must be there, with the power of this telescope, is tremendous. So much so, in fact, this discovery that it's been put out by the journal Nature without being fully peer reviewed. It's a solid paper, but they were so excited by it they put it out as fast as they could.

Chris - Well I was looking at some of the other things that James Webb is delivering this week and it's had a pretty good week, hasn't it? We've got black holes featured and also these interesting things about the cosmic web. Tell us about those other findings this week.

大卫,这是每年因为它真正开始观察erving and there's going to be a conference soon 'one year with the James Webb' and we are going to see wonders from this, but you're quite right. Two things that they've mentioned this week is that they found because of its ability to look very far into deep space and the early universe, the further away you look, the earlier it is in the universe's history, they found evidence for black holes in the centres of some galaxies, less than a billion years old, these galaxies. But the black holes were between 600 million and 2 billion times bigger than our sun, the mass of our sun. Now that is a real puzzle to cosmologists because they did not think in a billion years that black holes could grow so big so fast. And these are at the centers of galaxies and they will be powering those galaxies as they eat material and young stars and throw off radiation into the environment. But it's a puzzle as to how quick they got started and how rapidly they grew. And also looking even further back into the beginnings of the universe, back to 380 million years after the Big Bang, there's this wonderful picture of 10 galaxies in the line, so to speak. And they think that is the first real good observational evidence for, if you like, what they call the spider's web of structure around which galaxy clusters formed. Because if you look in the universe today, the galaxies aren't spread evenly around. They form clusters with big empty voids, voids between them. And that's the start of this structure. And you know, that's three amazing fundamental discoveries announced by James Webb in just one week. It's a wonderful instrument.