Related papers: Exploring refractory organics in extraterrestrial …

The synthesis of water is one necessary step in the origin and development of life. It is believed that pristine water is formed and grows on the surface of icy dust grains in dark interstellar clouds. Until now, there has been no…

Thanks to Rosetta orbiter's and Philae lander's data our knowledge of cometary nuclei composition has experienced a great advancement. The properties of 67P/CG nucleus are discussed and compared with other comets explored in the past by…

Understanding the origin of comets requires knowledge of how the Solar System formed from a cloud of dust and gas 4.567 Gyr ago. Here, a review is presented of how the remnants of this formation process, meteorites and to a lesser extent…

Tiny meteoroids entering the Earth's atmosphere and inducing meteor showers have long been thought to originate partly from cometary dust. Together with other dust particles, they form a huge cloud around the Sun, the zodiacal cloud. From…

Complex organic molecules have been observed for decades in the interstellar medium. Some of them might be considered as small bricks of the macromolecules at the base of terrestrial life. It is hence particularly important to understand…

Evidence for exocomets, icy bodies in extrasolar planetary systems, has rapidly increased over the past decade. Volatiles are detected through the gas that exocomets release as they collide and grind down within their natal belts, or as…

The solar nebula is thought to have undergone a number of episodes of FU Orionis outbursts during its early evolution. We present here the first calculations of the trajectories of particles in a marginally gravitationally unstable solar…

Deuterium-to-hydrogen (D/H) enrichments in molecular species provide clues about their original formation environment. The organic materials in primitive solar system bodies have generally higher D/H ratios and show greater D/H variation…

There is an unceasing incoming flux of extraterrestrial materials reaching the Earth's atmosphere. Some of these objects produce luminous columns when they ablate during the hypersonic encounter with air molecules. A few fireballs occur…

Aims. We tackle the conundrums of organic materials missing from interstellar dust when measured inside the Solar System, while undoubtedly existing in the local interstellar cloud (LIC), which surrounds the Solar System. Methods. We…

Many complex organic molecules (COMs) in star-forming regions are believed to form on dust grains. We thus expect both the reduced metallicity and dust-to-gas ratio in the outer Galaxy to have an impact on the chemical composition of these…

The ongoing quest to identify molecules in the interstellar medium by their electronic spectra in the visible region is reviewed. Identification of molecular absorption is described in the context of the elucidation of the carriers of the…

The past century of interstellar dust has brought us from first ignoring it to finding that it plays an important role in the evolution of galaxies. Current observational results in our galaxy provide a complex physical and chemical…

Interstellar objects are interlopers from other planetary systems, and their volatile compositions provide a glimpse into planet formation around their host star. We present near-infrared spectra of the coma of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS…

UltraCarbonaceous Antarctic MicroMeteorites (UCAMMs) represent a small fraction of interplanetary dust particles reaching the Earth's surface and contain large amounts of an organic component not found elsewhere. They are most probably…

The Earth and other rocky bodies in the inner solar system contain significantly less carbon than the primordial materials that seeded their formation. These carbon-poor objects include the parent bodies of primitive meteorites, suggesting…

Thanks to the advent of sensitive and broad bandwidth instrumentation, complex organic molecules (COMs) have been found in a wide variety of interstellar environments, not only in our Galaxy but also in external galaxies up to a redshift of…

Water condensed as ice beyond the water snowline, the location in the Sun's natal gaseous disk where temperatures were below 170 K. As the disk evolved and cooled, the snowline moved inwards. A low temperature in the terrestrial…

Carbonaceous chondrites are some of the most primitive meteorites and derive from planetesimals that formed a few million years after the beginning of the solar system. Here, using new and previously published Cr, Ti, and Te isotopic data,…

It is not known whether the original carriers of Earth's nitrogen were molecular ices or refractory dust. To investigate this question, we have used data and results of Herschel observations towards two protostellar sources: the high-mass…