Organic Molecules in Interstellar Space: Latest advances

16 pags., 14 figs.
Although first considered as too diluted for the formation of molecules in-situ and too harsh an environment for their survival, the interstellar medium has turned out to host a rich palette of molecular species: to date, 256 species, not counting isotopologues, have been identified. The last decade, and more particularly the last 2 years, have seen an explosion of new detections, including those of a number of complex organic species, which may be dubbed as prebiotic. Organic molecules have been discovered not just in interstellar clouds from the Solar neighbourhood, but also throughout the Milky-Way, as well as in nearby galaxies, or some of the most distant quasars. These discoveries were made possible by the completion of large sub-millimetre and radio facilities. Equipped with new generation receivers, those instruments have provided the orders of magnitude leap in sensitivity required to detect the vanishingly weak rotational lines that allowed the molecule identifications. Last 2 years, 30 prebiotic molecules have been detected in TMC-1, a dustenshrouded gaseous cloud located at 400 light-years from the Sun in the Taurus constellation. Ten new molecular species, have been identified in the arm of a spiral galaxy seven billion light-yr distant, and 12 molecular species observed in a quasar at 11 billion light-yr. We present the latest spectral observations of this outlying quasar and discuss the implications of those detections in these 3 archetypal sources. The basic ingredients involved in the Miller-Urey experiment and related experiments (H2, H2O, CH4, NH3, CO, H2S, ... ) appeared early after the formation of the first galaxies and are widespread throughout the Universe. The chemical composition of the gas in distant galaxies seems not much different from that in the nearby interstellar clouds. It presumably comprises, like for TMC-1, aromatic rings and complex organic molecules putative precursors of the RNA nucleobases, except the lines of such complex species are too weak to be detected that far.
J. Cernicharo thanks ERC for funding support through grant ERC-2013-Syg-610256-NANOCOSMOS, and the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación of Spain (MICIU) for funding support through projects PID2019-106110GB-I00, PID2019-107115GBC21/AEI/10.130 39/501 100 011 033, and PID2019-106235GB-I00. This paper makes use of ALMA data from project 2017.1.01 232.S, of IRAM NOEMA interferometer data from projects V03E, W19DA and S20BY, and of Yebes 40-m telescope data from projects 19A003, 20A014, 20A017, 20D023, and 21A011. ALMA is a partnership of ESO (representing its member states), NSF (United States) and NINS (Japan), together with NRC (Canada), MOST and ASIAA (Taiwan), and KASI (Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. IRAM is supported by INSU/CNRS (France), MPG (Germany) and IGN (Spain). The Yebes 40-m telescope belongs to Instituto Geografico Nacional (Spain).