Cosmic dust chemistry forges peptide building blocks in deep space
New experiments show that key molecular building blocks for life can form spontaneously on icy dust grains in deep space long before planets emerge from collapsing gas clouds. In a laboratory at Aarhus University and at the HUN-REN Atomki facility in Hungary, researchers Sergio Ioppolo and Alfred Thomas Hopkinson reproduced the extreme conditions in giant interstellar dust clouds, where te