Speaker
Description
In the past decade, Astrochemistry has witnessed an impressive increase in the number of detections of complex organic molecules. Some of these species are of prebiotic interest such as glycolaldehyde, the simplest sugar, or amino acetonitrile, a possible
precursor of glycine. Recently, we have reported the detection of several new complex organic species in the interstellar medium, such as hydroxylamine, ethanolamine and n-
propanol, known to be intermediate species in the formation process of ribonucleotides
and phospholipids within theories for the origin of life. In this talk, I will present our recent efforts to establish whether key precursors of prebiotic systems chemistry can be found in space, and I will show how we can tackle searches with future instrumentation such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
