Astronomers Find a Form of Alcohol Never Seen Before in Space
A team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) reports the first detection in space of fully deuterated methanol, found in the gas around a star that is still forming. In this version of methanol, the simplest alcohol, every hydrogen atom in the molecule is replaced by deuterium, a heavier form of hydrogen.
The authors say the find shows how useful deuterium can be as a tool for tracing how organic molecules form and are handed on while a star takes shape.
Arnaud Belloche of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and colleagues found the molecule, written CD₃OD, toward IRAS 4A2, one of two young stars in the IRAS 4A system in the NGC 1333 cloud. Their paper, published Oct. 7, 2026, in Astronomy & Astrophysics, also reports several other forms of methanol carrying heavier atoms at the same source. The paper states that the molecule had never been firmly identified in interstellar space before.
The paper reports that methanol around that star carries a rising share of deuterium as more of its hydrogen atoms are swapped out, a pattern already measured around other young, low-mass stars. The authors add that chemical models of cold cores built to follow deuterium do not reproduce that pattern in detail, and that the new detection widens the gap.
The detection came out of COMPASS, an ALMA observing program. According to the NSF National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a partner in ALMA, COMPASS is surveying 11 nearby, Sun-like infant stars, has taken more than 100 hours of telescope time, and has published its first seven papers in the same journal. The observatory's release places the star about 1,000 light-years from Earth, in the Perseus molecular cloud.
NRAO's release says another paper in the set found methanol masers, naturally occurring radio beacons, around more than half of the stars observed. That paper was led by Jae-Hong Jeong, a graduate student at Seoul National University; the release adds that such emission may be common early in a star's life.
