Hubble, James Webb and Carbon from the Ramayana and Mahabharata Era

High-Resolution optical and infrared imagery will paint imaginations, blossom creativity, inspire minds, and put us in awe of nature once again. That is what the James Webb Space Telescope is now doing to us. But let's give a big round of applause to the Hubble too!

The Pillars of Creation, located in the Eagle Nebula, as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. (Image Credits: NASA, Hubble Space Telescope, Jeff Hester, and Paul Scowen (Arizona State University).

Many years ago, it was sometime between 1999 and 2001, that astronomers, astronomy enthusiasts, scientists, and the public at large, took to the polls to determine the most impactful of all images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Back then, Hubble was basking in the glory as the James Webb Space Telescope today is. The poll overwhelmingly selected the Pillars of Creation as the most iconic images pictured by the Hubble, followed by the Horsehead Nebula. Personally, I like them all!

The Pillars of Creation went on to get printed on t-shirts and coffee mugs; they competed in board rooms and living rooms with Dali, Van Gogh, Ravi Varma, and Da Vinci paintings. They were so close to us, becoming pop-culture icons, yet so far away from us. The Pillars of Creation are roughly around 6500-7000 light years away! That means what we see today as the Pillars of Creation is how they appeared 6500-7000 years ago, perhaps during the times of the Mahabharata or let's go with a recent evidence, around the time when our ancestors built the bronze-era chariot found in Sinauli.

Astronomy, which was riddled with complex mathematics and physics, familiar to a few able minds, thanks to Hubble, spread out in the common masses. Look at those pillars! It is easy for anyone to get swayed by the depth of perception they generate. Our minds want to understand what created those shades of green, blue, ochre, and yellow? What made the pillars darker than their surroundings? In short, those terrible, like me, with math and physics, began looking at these objects through the lenses of chemists, biologists, or artists.

I recently published a peer-reviewed paper, "Evidence for protosolar graphene in Allende and QUE 94366 CV3 meteorites". Reading the title, you can consider why I empathise with those who see these objects as chemists. There are many like me who always wanted to know what hid in the dark clouds of such nebulae? They certainly are not rain clouds as rain clouds are effervescent. These dark clouds last for several thousand, if not millions of years. And since these are clouds, they are supposed to be dynamic. And even if they shape-shift in a few hundred years, this is a reasonably small period in time and dynamic enough to be called as clouds by those who control the universe!

On a serious note, currently, we cannot source materials or do in situ sampling from these far-away nebulae. But we can know what they could be made of. That is possible by retrieving materials dating from the times when our sun did not exist, nor did the planets; Those were the times, when our solar system was a protoplanetary nebula, a star-forming region akin to what we see in these stunning images. That itself is gladdening, that our solar system, or any star system, is beautiful, to begin with. As planetary nebulae, the dead stars, they end up beautifully too. But the perception of beauty comes only when one is located many thousand light years away. Getting close to these protoplanetary or planetary nebulae is fatal. They are replete with all that life, as we know, can't withstand. High temperatures (500 degrees celsius plus), highly ionizing radiations, and hypersonic and vortexing winds that can easily throw material from the orbits of Mercury to farther than Pluto in no time.

However, the one element that could withstand such forces and yet eventually lead to something as delicate as a tendril or an embryo is carbon. Carbon can easily replace steel in the saying 'the strongest steel must pass through the hottest fire'! And we do come across such strong carbon in meteorites older than the planets in our solar system. We studied some in the paper I mentioned. The carbon, we studied, which assumed the form of nanoscale graphene was perhaps synthesized at temperatures exceeding 1000 degrees celsius close to the proto-Sun.

Over the years, numerous infrared astronomy studies by the Spitzer Space Telescope, Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, and the infrared observatories in Wyoming and Hawaii have tried looking into such dark nebular clouds, those around Wolf-Rayet stars (a peculiar class of stars showing prominent emissions of nitrogen and carbon and with surface temperatures far exceeding any typical star), carbon-emitting stars, and interstellar molecular clouds. Astronomers have observed dark and dense clouds in high and ultra-low temperature zones. The chemistry operating in these zones is vastly different. In high-temperature zones it is driven familiarly by temperatures, pressures, reactants, and catalysts. In zones of ultra-low temperatures, these dark clouds are to-go places for quantum kinetics and tunneling effect, which we humans have only recently discovered.

The Hubble Era, 1990-ongoing, has contributed massively to our understanding of the chemistry occurring in the universe. The length and breadth of the astro- and cosmo-chemistries are simply astounding. The star-forming regions of the Carina Nebula, photographed by the James Webb and that are going viral on global social media, too, could have some fantastic chemistry within them. Interestingly, Carina is located around 8500 light years away. That means the light James Webb is seeing today coming from Carina set its journey to the Earth roughly during the times of Shri Ram.

While doing my Ph.D. with Prof. Uwe Meierhenrich in Nice, France, I was introduced to a phenomenon we were mimicking at SOLEIL Synchrotron. Through a fantastic paper published by Jeremy Bailey in Science in 1998, we learned that the Orion Molecular Cloud (OMC-1) star-forming region, a region similar to NGC 3324, emits circularly polarized light. Such light can switch the handedness of so-called chiral molecules. That means a heady mix of left- and right-handed molecules if exposed to right-handed circularly polarized light, can destroy substantial amounts of left-handed molecules and create a bias towards right-handedness and vice versa. It is said that all the life forms on Earth predominantly use left-handed amino acids. That means the protein that we consume, in the form of plants, meat, or whey protein jars sold at pharmacy stores, all contain left-handed amino acids. The origin of their handedness is likely exposure, sometime during the birth of our our sun, to circularly polarised light that made our amino acids left-handed.

Just let your imaginations run wild. Think what would have happened if life on Earth created another strong binary - left-handed amino acid made lifeforms and right-handed amino acid made lifeforms? Imagine falling in love with someone who innately is made of right-handed amino acids!! We can't even think that far yet. But certainly, we can look at regions that might create this homochiral bias in molecules thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope.

The James Webb has tremendous potential and is far superior in its technical specifications to the Hubble, thanks to the nearly 10 billion dollars invested in it. So each image we see coming from the James Webb is at least worth a few thousand dollars. To make most of this American investment, what we must do, sitting here in Asia, is to dig deep into every image and spectrum the James Webb generates.

As I said, astronomy is not just the domain of physicists and mathematicians. As chemists or biologists, there is much to gather from the James Webb. We in India can support astrochemical laboratory simulations of at least some phenomena we would see through James Webb in the coming years. That'd do wonders for our scientific and industrial pursuits in chemistry, material sciences, electronics and other domains that'd bring money bags to us. It only depends on how passionate our scientists, institution-managers, and funding agencies are to see behind the haze, what lies within the dark clouds, and if life is hidden in any of the pixels. Maybe, this blog could convince them!

Star-forming region NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope. (Image Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI)

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