[HN Gopher] Hydrogen cyanide and acetylene detected in a brown d...
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       Hydrogen cyanide and acetylene detected in a brown dwarf
        
       Author : wglb
       Score  : 38 points
       Date   : 2025-02-28 02:46 UTC (20 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (phys.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
        
       | wglb wrote:
       | Arxiv paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13610
        
       | SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
       | Can someone explain why this is significant? Is this a precursor
       | for something such as life?
        
         | deadlydose wrote:
         | You could try reading the linked paper. If I am reading it
         | correctly, basically, we have atmospheric models for brown
         | dwarfs and the presence of C2H2 and compounds cannot be
         | explained by those models. So they think there are more complex
         | atmospheric processes like aurora or lightning behind it.
        
           | SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
           | Yeah I definitely attempted but stellar chemistry isn't
           | something I'd say I'm comfortable with particularly at the
           | level required to comprehend a paper. That said, the subject
           | is very interesting to me.
        
         | klodolph wrote:
         | According to the paper's abstract,
         | 
         | - We'd like to study exoplanet atmospheres, but that's hard
         | because you can't separate them from the star. Brown dwarfs are
         | a good substitute because they are kind of like really big
         | exoplanets.
         | 
         | - There's chemistry happening inside the atmosphere of a brown
         | dwarf, and chemicals will get transported up or down from where
         | they are made. The detection of HCN in the brown dwarf spectrum
         | means that some of our models for brown dwarfs are wrong.
        
         | gilleain wrote:
         | One neat thing I know about HCN and early chemical evolution is
         | that some DNA bases can be created from HCN polymerisation.
         | 
         | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31491/
         | 
         | Like if you look at adenine, it is 'just' N-C-N-C all the way
         | round.
        
         | mystified5016 wrote:
         | They're inorganic compounds that can be produced without life.
         | 
         | The interesting part is that these are _really weird_ chemicals
         | to show up in a _star_. Acetylene isn 't stable enough to just
         | hang around for millions of years, so it must be being actively
         | produced somehow. This brown dwarf is doing things we can't
         | explain.
         | 
         | It's a neat find, but (almost certainly) not aliens.
        
       | rini17 wrote:
       | About 0.81 Jupiter radii with 50-70 times of mass? That gravity
       | must hurt.
        
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       (page generated 2025-02-28 23:02 UTC)