Overview

• The inventory includes the first tentative detections of ethylene glycol and glycolonitrile, which serve as precursors to amino acids like glycine and alanine and the nucleobase adenine.
• Analyses indicate that these complex organics formed on icy dust grains in cold interstellar clouds and persisted through violent protostellar accretion outbursts.
• Accretion-driven heating during V883 Orionis’s outbursts evaporates frozen compounds, enabling ALMA’s high-resolution spectroscopy to capture faint molecular signatures.
• The results support a continuous astrochemical enrichment pathway from cold clouds through star formation into protoplanetary disks, reinforcing inheritance models.
• Teams are preparing higher-resolution and multi-wavelength ALMA observations to validate the tentative identifications and uncover additional complex organic molecules.