Basic organic molecules appear much before they should

Nikolina Benedikovic gave a link to an interesting article about the appearance of pre-biotic molecules in stellar nurseries at time when star formation had not yet begun. The article told about the work of astrophysicists Yancy Shirley and Samantha Scibelli published in Astrophysical Journal with the title "Prevalence of Complex Organic Molecules in Starless and Prestellar Cores within the Taurus Molecular Cloud".

The stellar nursery studied consisted of 31 starless cores scattered throughout a star-forming region in Taurus molecular cloud located about 440 ly from Earth. The molecules studied were methanol (CH3OH) and acetaldehyde (CH3CHO). These molecules serving as building bricks for chemical life were found to be much more ubiquitous than expected and present hundreds of thousands of years before star formation actually began.

The molecular evolution producing complex organic molecules requires the analog of metabolic energy feed: the temperature should be quite high - measured using molecular binding energies as scale - about few eV typically. The existing theories assume that proto-stars - stars in the process of formation produced the heating necessary for the formation of these molecules. But in regions without proto-stars the temperature of gas has been quite to provide the heating. Where did the energy needed for local heating come from?

TGD based view about "cold fusion" - which during last years has been getting rid of the label of pseudoscience - is that it is induced by what I call dark nuclear fusion possible at low temperatures (see this). Dark matter corresponds in TGD Universe to ordinary particles but with non-standard value of Planck constant (or cautiously effective Planck constant) h_eff=nh₀ larger than h.

Dark nuclei formed as dark proton sequences at magnetic flux tubes with protons having distance about electron Compton length and scaled down nuclear binding energy in eV scale would have formed at temperatures of order eV or even lower. They would have spontaneously decayed to ordinary nuclei liberating energy of order nuclear binding energy, which is in MeV scale. The dark nuclei can actually occur in several scales but could transform sequentially to ordinary nuclei. The liberated nuclear binding energy would have heated the gas locally. This kind of regions would have served as pre-stellar objects leading to protostars and eventually stellar cores as ordinary nuclear reactions would have started.

TGD predicts that also ordinary nuclear reactions are initiated by phase transitions generating dark nuclei as intermediate states: this would be the counterpart for quantum tunnelling assumed to take place in ordinary nuclear reactions and allow them to already occur at collision energies about 1/100 lower than classical considerations would allow (see for instance this and this).

See the article Solar Metallicity Problem from TGD Perspective or the chapter with the same title.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

Articles and other material related to TGD.