Astronomers have taken particular interest in the study of young stars similar to our Sun in its formative years. These solar-type protostars are windows into the past, allowing astronomers to observe cosmic conditions similar to those that resulted in our solar system a little more than 4.5 billion years ago. Now, two teams of astronomers have detected a chemical building block of life during their study of one such multiple star system.
The two teams, whose separate papers are published in the same issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to observe IRAS 16293-2422, a multiple star system located in a large star-forming region known as the Rho Ophiuchi, part of the constellation of Ophiuchus, some 400 light-years away from Earth.
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