THE SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM
70 Falmouth Street Portland, Maine 04103
(207) 780-4249 www.usm.maine.edu/southworth-planetarium
43.67° N 70.27° W
Founded January 1970
2022-2023: CI
Sunrise: 4:59 a.m.
Sunset: 8:23 p.m.
Civil twilight begins: 4:23 a.m.
Civil twilight ends: 8:59 p.m.
Sun's host constellation: Taurus the Bull
Lunar phase: Waning crescent (31% illuminated)
Moon rise: 1:51 a.m.
Moon set: 2:41 p.m.
Julian date: 2460108.29
"Jeaniuses at werk"
THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Monday, June 12, 2023
The Early Organics
It's Monday.
Breathe.
Notice that. The time of week notwithstanding, you're alive. Not only you, but those in your vicinity and the billions roaming around well outside of it, as well. Also, the trees standing like indefatigable sentries beyond your window, the billowing grasses expanding radially away from them, the pestiferous insect swarms, bewildered snowbirds, gluttonous skin-craving dust mites, not to mention the various sundry fish darting frantically and behemoth whales lumbering lethargically within the tenebrous realms of the wine-dark sea. Let's not forget the untold trillions of Proteobacteria, Verrocumicrobia, Firmicutes, and the rest of the staggering array of invasive microbes dining parasitically within your gasto-intestinal tract. Life proliferates within our world now just as it has done for billions of years. Of course, there's much more diversity now than existed in the early days. All the same, life took hold along the cracked, steaming membrane of our smouldering world nearly 3.8 billion years ago and after an uneasy period of cleaving tenaciously to our trembling Earth spread like malicious gossip all around it.
Makes one wonder.
Along how many other worlds within the Universe does life exist; be it inthe form of prokaryotic cells clustered in warm ponds or mega-cities populated by highly advanced , space-faring bi- or tripeds? Also, how long has life existed within the Universe? At what point did the cosmos generate the elements necessary to construct the first life forms? Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have possibly discovered the answer. In a paper published in Nature and entitled 'Spatial Variations in aromatic hydrocarbon emission in a dust-rich galaxy,' astronomer Justin Spiker and his team have announced the detection of organic molecules in the galaxy SPT0418-47, located 12 billion light years away. Since these molecules, known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), were found in a galaxy 12 billion light years away, they existed 12 billion years ago, slightly more than one billion years after the Big Bang.
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHS) were recently detected in a galaxy 12 billion light years away. The presence of such molecules in the early Universe might indicate that life developed relatively soon after the birth of the Universe. (Image: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
PAHS serve as the basic building blocks for the simplest life forms. According to Spiker, PAHS are quite common in space and, as we all now know, were present in the early Universe. The detection of life's essential components might indicate that life could have started relatively soon after the Universe formed 13.82 billion years ago.
It has been said that the Universe's true purpose is not merely the construction of life, but the generation of intelligence, artificial or otherwise. Perhaps. In any event, we at least know that the Universe might have been capable of forming life almost as soon as conditions were conducive to its development.
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