Flying To The Star | Music-Video | Space And Time | Longing For You | Time Travel | Star Cruiser

Bright moonlight shines in through your window, beckoning you with glimmer and shimmer. In a mystical way it invites you to dream. To a journey very quietly, far, far and so boundlessly far your dream carries you through space and time to the star of infinity.
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Spitzer provided spectrograms of 100 very young stars in a star-forming region in the constellation Serpent Bearer (Ophiuchus), 375 light-years away. One of these stars has evidence of organic molecules, acetylene and hydrogen cyanide.
These gases, in combination with water, form a number of different amino acids. These form proteins as well as one of the four building blocks of DNA, the base adenine. The organic molecules were discovered in a ring of dust and gas around the young star IRS 446. These dust rings, found around all the young stars studied, are believed to be the raw material for the formation of planets. The spectrographic data show that the gases are very hot and must orbit the star at a short distance, roughly in the "habitable zone," the region where the Earth orbits the Sun and where water occurs in the boundary between liquid and gas.
The discovery supports the widely held theory that many of the building blocks of life were present in our solar system before planets formed. This favored the formation of complex organic molecules and eventually life.
Stars that contain comparatively large amounts of heavy elements offer less favorable conditions for the emergence of complex life than metal-poor stars. This is the conclusion of an international group of researchers from the Max Planck Institutes for Solar System Research (Göttingen) and for Chemistry (Mainz) and the University of Göttingen. The team has shown the connection between the metallicity of a star and the ability of its planets to build up a protective ozone layer. Crucial to this is the intensity of the ultraviolet light that the star emits into space, in different wavelength ranges. The study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, provides researchers searching the sky with space telescopes for habitable star systems with important clues as to where the search might be particularly promising. It also suggests a startling conclusion: as the universe ages, it becomes a place increasingly unfriendly to the emergence of life on new planets.