Cosmic sulfur fingerprint found

About the episode

Sulfur is essential to all living things. It is also one of the chemical elements that make up DNA. That is why you find it on our planet, but also in the gas clouds that make up the planets. It is only when those gas clouds collapse to form planets and stars that most of the sulfur can be detected with a telescope.

So we’re missing a piece of knowledge there. How does sulfur end up on a planet in a cloud like this? And in what form? Of all the sulfur in the universe, we only know where about 1 percent of it is. That tiny fraction is usually seen in molecules, like sulfur dioxide or hydrogen sulfide. But where’s the rest?

Thanks to simulations of chemical reactions in the gas clouds that form planets and stars, the researchers from HFML-FELIX at Radboud University have already seen that chains and rings of sulfur can form. For example, the ring-shaped sulfur molecule S8. But can this type of sulfur survive in space and end up on young planets? To answer this question, you must first be able to detect these types of molecules in such a gas cloud.

And now we’re closer to that. Using the FELIX infrared laser, scientists have captured for the first time the cosmic fingerprint of the more stable (but still fragile) sulfur molecule S8, and many smaller sulfur molecules. This allows the James Webb Space Telescope to search for these molecules in a more targeted way.

Read more about the research here: Cosmic fingerprints found for sulfur rings