Astrocast.TV

As someone who teaches astrobiology, I find it amusing to read about astronomers complaining about the abundance of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) in young stellar objects (YSO) in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). You see, it wasn’t too long ago that astronomers first learned that such complex organic molecules as PAH existed in gas clouds (nebulae) in interstellar space. Such molecules are one of the building blocks of life itself, so to hear astronomers complain about the presence of PAH in their data, strikes a chord to me. Anyhow, there is a reason that these astronomers are complaining about the PAH present in their data, and that is because these astronomers were looking for evidence of water ice and carbon dioxide ice (dry ice) in the spectra of YSOs in the LMC. Anyhow, check out the pre-print of their paper to appear in the Astrophysical Journal, available online now here, to learn more about the nature of gas clouds that develop into stars and stellar systems.