Using the combined powers of ALMA, a powerful observatory, and Rosetta, the European Space Agency's comet-studying probe, scientists have for the first time observed the precise cosmic origins of phosphorus, an element essential to life.
Scientists were able to locate phosphorus in the star-forming region AFGL 5142. The astronomers' attraction to AFGL 5142 was two-fold.
"AFGL 5142 is relatively close to us and therefore you can get the necessary spatial resolution," study author Kathrin Altwegg, an astrophysicist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, told UPI. "Scientists also believe by now that our sun emerged from something similar: a massive cloud where large and small stars are formed simultaneously."
Researchers have previously found phosphorus in distant regions of space, but were unable to pinpoint the precise location of the element within star-forming regions. The power of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, located in the Chilean desert, allowed scientists to determine the exact location of cosmic phosphorus within AFGL 5142.