Dying Star Creates Seeds of Life

The death of a star provides the ideal conditions for new life in space. It's called VY Canis Majoris and it's a red hypergiant, towards the end of its life. It's also the largest known star and one of the most luminous. A new study shows that it's also a surprising nursery for possible lifeforms.

Warm gas escaping from the giant is an ideal environment where complex molecules could form, the same ones that made life on Earth possible. The large amounts of matter it spews could trigger a chain reaction that could produce organic molecules from basic atoms.

"Where we thought molecules could never form, we're finding them. Where we thought molecules could never survive, they're surviving," says Lucy Ziurys, an astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson, US.

The star is so huge that it takes light 2 hours to travel around its circumference. If our Sun had been the size of VY Canis Majoris, its surface would have been where now Saturn is, the sixth planet of our solar system.

The team of astronomers used the 10-meter radio dish located on Mount Graham in Arizona to observe the cloud of gas surrounding the red hypergiant, 500,000 times brighter than the Sun. They found radio emissions corresponding to complex compounds, like hydrogen cyanide (HCN), sodium chloride (NaCl- salt) silicon monoxide (SiO) and PN, a molecule made of phosphorus and nitrogen.

This molecule is particularly interesting for astrobiologists, because, even if it's simple in composition, it's relatively rare in the universe, but most importantly, it's essential for the construction of DNA and RNA molecules, as well as ATP, the most important molecule in cellular metabolism.

Adding the fact that the star itself is rich in oxygen and can also form carbon monoxide (CO), it seems that this red hypergiant, towards the end of its life, is a repository of varios chemical elements that can later find their way into newborn solar systems.