Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2023

13 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2023 ASTRO PUBLISHING tive species formed in the wispy voids of molecular clouds in deep space, where simple and complex molecules alike have little protec- tion from the pummeling UV radia- tion of stars in their vicinity. While something like methyl cation would interact both quickly and highly re- actively in environments like our own atmosphere or in the beaker of a reaction vessel in some laboratory, the very low density of molecules in the interstellar medium, even when contained in relatively dense molec- ular clouds in these same regions, means that these irradiated mole- cules can persist for very long peri- ods of time, making their detection possible. The methyl cation, a charged species made reactive by the desire for this carbon to make another chemical bond and neutral- ize its positive charge, adds that in- cremental carbon atom to some increasingly large molecule that, over millions of years and uncount- able numbers of interactions with more photons and other molecules, eventually can make the larger mol- ecules we are now also able to de- tect more reliability thanks to having an excellent infrared tele- scope like the JWST in space. The study, by Olivier Berné of the French National Center for Scientific Research and co-workers from Euro- pean, US, and Japanese organiza- tions, reports that methyl cation was detected in d203-506, one of the numerous protoplanetary disks identified in the Orion Nebula about 1350 light years distant. What was once simply a star-form- ing region of atomic and molecular nebulosity was discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope to also be host to protoplanetary systems now condensing these molecular clouds into larger molecules at one scale and protoplanets at another. The reactivity and chemistry of methyl cation simply adds to the complex- question now might be how the ab- sence or presence of these PAHs – or the processes that eventually pro- duce them – changes any aspect of the star formation process. Finally, it is noteworthy that these compli- cated molecules formed in a rela- tively short period of time on cosmological scales, for which the reason why such complexity in mo- lecular structures occurred so early in the history of the universe is also a mystery. A second study, appearing in the June 26 issue of Nature , reports the detection of one of the simplest or- ganic molecules, a reactive building block of more complicated mole- cules in the interstellar medium. Methyl cation, CH 3 + , is a highly reac-