Reach for the stars: discovering the Universe

Is our solar system unique, or are the ingredients for life commonly found around young stars? To answer this question, we need to determine when, where, and how the building blocks for planets, comets, and asteroids are formed around nascent stars. Isotopes, "flavors" of atoms, are ideal fingerprints for constraining the history of cosmic matter. Using radio telescopes, astronomers can measure isotopes in space and shed light on the processes that shaped our solar system, in particular the origin and delivery of molecules important for life, such as water, nitrogen, and other volatiles.

All corners of our Universe are blooming in molecules. Some of these even contain many more than 6 atoms! How can such complex molecules form under the extreme cold and low-density conditions of the interstellar medium? In my talk, I will demystify this by showing you how step-by-step processes in gas and ice pave the way to chemistry in space. To understand these processes and to reveal the exact chemical composition of interstellar gases and ices, molecular astrophysicists observe with world-class facilities such as ALMA and JWST and run sophisticated computer simulations.

Life is created in a sequence of chemical reactions that produce increasingly more complex molecules. This chemical sequence can take place on the surface of a planet like Earth, but perhaps it already starts long before planets are formed, in the clouds of gas and dust that stars and planets are formed from. During this talk we will use our most powerful telescope to make a journey over hundreds of light years to look at the birth of a star were we might also be able to find a chemical spark of life.