Related papers: The carbon monoxide-rich interstellar comet 2I/Bor…
Recent observations made by the Rosetta/ROSINA instrument have detected molecular oxygen in the coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko with abundances at the 1-10% level relative to H2O. Previous studies have indicated that the likely…
Comets are considered to be some of the most pristine and unprocessed solar system objects accessible to in-situ exploration. Investigating their molecular and elemental composition takes us on a journey back to the early period of our…
Comets are pristine remnants of the Solar system, composed of dust and ice. They remain inactive and undetectable for most of their orbit due to low temperatures. However, as they approach the Sun, volatile materials sublimate, expelling…
The puzzling complexity of terrestrial biomolecules is driving the search for complex organic molecules in the Interstellar Medium (ISM) and serves as a motivation for many in situ studies of reservoirs of extraterrestrial organics from…
Observations of comets and asteroids show that the Solar Nebula that spawned our planetary system was rich in water and organic molecules. Bombardment brought these organics to the young Earth's surface, seeding its early chemistry. Unlike…
Complex organic molecules (COMs) in protoplanetary disks are key to understanding the origin of volatiles in comets in our solar system, yet the chemistry of COMs in protoplanetary disks remains poorly understood. Here we present Atacama…
CO is thought to be the main reservoir of volatile carbon in protoplanetary disks, and thus the primary initial source of carbon in the atmospheres of forming giant planets. However, recent observations of protoplanetary disks point towards…
The cosmic dust particles found in space are mainly porous aggregates of smaller grains. Theoretically, these aggregates are replicated using fractal geometry, assuming a cluster of spheres. Although, the light scattering response of cosmic…
We describe pre-perihelion optical observations of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS taken during July - September 2025 using the Nordic Optical Telescope. Fixed aperture photometry of the comet is well described by a power law function of…
The nature of the icy material accreted by comets during their formation in the outer regions of the protosolar nebula is a major open question in planetary science. Some scenarios of comet formation predict that these bodies agglomerated…
Extremely metal-poor galaxies with metallicity below 10% of the solar value in the local universe are the best analogues to investigating the interstellar medium at a quasi-primitive environment in the early universe. In spite of the…
We analyze findings of the Stardust mission that brought to the Earth dust from the 81P/Wild 2 coma. Just as the data of the Deep Impact mission to 9P/Tempel 1, they are at odds with the widely accepted condensation/sublimation comet…
Our modern day Solar System has $4.6\times10^9$ yrs of evolution behind it with just a few relics of its birth conditions remaining. Comets are thought to be some of the most pristine tracers of the initial ingredients that were combined to…
The ratios of the three stable oxygen isotopes 16O, 17O and 18O on Earth and, as far as we know in the solar system, show variations on the order of a few percent at most, with a few outliers in meteorites. However, in the interstellar…
During the planet formation process, billions of comets are created and ejected into interstellar space. The detection and characterization of such interstellar comets (also known as extra-solar planetesimals or extra-solar comets) would…
The recent observations show that comet C/2016 R2 (Pan-Starrs) has a unique and peculiar composition when compared with several other comets observed at 2.8 au heliocentric distance. Assuming solar resonance fluorescence is the only…
During the process of star formation, the dense gas undergoes significant chemical evolution leading to the emergence of a rich variety of molecules associated with hot cores and hot corinos. However, the physical and chemical conditions…
Interstellar CO2 is an important reservoir of carbon and oxygen, and one of the major constituents of the icy mantles of dust grains, but it is not observable directly in the cold gas because has no permanent dipole moment. Its protonated…
Molecular oxygen has been detected in the coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko with abundances in the 1-10% range by the ROSINA-DFMS instrument on board the Rosetta spacecraft. Here we find that the radiolysis of icy grains in…
(Abridged) The birth environment of the Sun will have influenced the conditions in the pre-solar nebula, including the attainable chemical complexity, important for prebiotic chemistry. The formation and distribution of complex organic…