Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2019

56 MAY-JUNE 2019 SPACE CHRONICLES tection, however, shows that the en- vironment around this star is very unusual.” To detect molecules in space, astronomers use radio tele- scopes to search for their chemical signatures – telltale spikes in the spread-out spectra of radio and mil- limeter-wavelength light. Atoms and molecules emit these signals in sev- eral ways, depending on the temper- ature of their environments. The new ALMA observations con- tain a bristling array of spectral sig- natures – or transitions, as astron- omers refer to them – of the same molecules. To create such strong and varied molecular fingerprints, the temperature differences where the molecules reside must be extreme, ranging anywhere from 100 kelvin to 4,000 kelvin (about -175 Celsius to 3700 Celsius). by ALMA Observatory Liberal sprinkling of salt discovered around a young star A team of astronomers and chemists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillime- ter Array (ALMA) has detected the chemical fingerprints of sodium chlo- ride (NaCl) and other similar salty compounds emanating from the dusty disk surrounding Orion Source I, a massive, young star in a dusty cloud behind the Orion Nebula. “It’s amazing we’re seeing these molecules at all,” said Adam Gins- burg, a Jansky Fellow of the Na- tional Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Socorro, New Mexico, and lead author of a paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal . “Since we’ve only ever seen these compounds in the sloughed- off outer layers of dying stars, we don’t fully know what our new dis- covery means. The nature of the de-