An organic compound on Pluto has been identified by Taiwanese researchers by simulating Pluto’s environment and creating an organic compound, which might help prove the hypothesis that life on Earth originated from organic compounds brought by comets.
A team led by the National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center’s Wu Yu-jong (吳宇中) created an organic compound — 2-cyano ketenimine — which is what was discovered on Pluto’s surface by the Hubble telescope in 2012, researchers said.
“We know the substance we created in the laboratory is identical to that on Pluto because their ultraviolet and infrared absorption spectra — which can be understood as the fingerprints of molecules — are the same,” Wu said yesterday.
The Hubble telescope in 2012 captured the ultraviolet absorption spectrum of an unknown substance on Pluto that resembled the spectrum of nitrile species, but scientists were not able to identify it.
Wu, interested by the Hubble finding, designed a laboratory that simulated the space environment of the dwarf planet and bombarded gaseous molecules — mostly nitrogen with a small amount of methane, which is similar to Pluto’s atmospheric composition — with a high-energy electron beam, which was used to simulate cosmic rays.
However, the team failed to recombine those molecules to form a more complex organic molecule in the first three years of experiments.
In July last year, NASA space probe New Horizons made a flyby of Pluto. Data collected during the flyby inspired Wu to redesign his experiment.
Scientists began to theorize that a dark red spot on Pluto’s surface might be smog that was exposed to cosmic rays and fell onto Pluto’s surface. The theory prompted Wu to reverse the process of the experiment by bombarding gaseous particles first and then freezing them.
That led to the creation of 2-cyano ketenimine — an organic compound not found on Earth.
Wu and his team are the first to show that organic compounds exist on Pluto.
“Our research might help explain the origin of organic compounds on Earth. It has been assumed that organic compounds might have been brought to Earth by comets originating from the Kuiper belt, which is home to Pluto,” Wu said.
The Kuiper belt is a disc consisting mainly of small bodies in the Solar System beyond the planets, and it has been hypothesized that debris produced when the Solar System was formed might have been thrown to the Kuiper belt, and that cosmic rays might have caused those materials to form organic compounds that could give rise to more complex molecules, such as amino acids and proteins that are essential to life.
“Our findings further support the suggestion that other organic compounds might exist on the surface of Pluto. We will conduct further research to analyze whether there are biomolecules on the planet with new data collected by New Horizons,” Wu said.
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