Methyl Chloride Discovered in Two Different Places

2 October, 2017 / Read time: 1 minute

Using data captured by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in Chile and from the ROSINA instrument on ESA’s Rosetta mission, a team of astronomers has found faint traces of methyl chloride, around both the infant star system IRAS 16293-2422, about 400 light-years away, and the famous comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P/C-G), in our own Solar System. The new ALMA observation is the first detection ever of an organohalogen in interstellar space.

Credits: National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)