Marina Gomes Rachid, a PhD student at the Leiden University Laboratory for Astrophysics, has identified some of the molecules that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) might come across in its search for life’s building blocks lightyears away. The JWST observes how stars send infrared light through space, making the molecules it meets along the way visible. Gomes Rachid is interested in the molecules that are created during the early phase of the formation of a new star, when a huge cloud of gas and dust floats around in space. In the Leiden laboratory, she observed how these frozen organic molecules absorbed the infrared light shined upon them. Looking at how each molecule absorbed the light, she measured its ‘fingerprint’ and added it to a database. Thanks to this information, the JWST now knows precisely what all these tiny molecules look like in infrared light. The research could help to identify prebiotic molecules in space and ultimately shed light on our own origins.
