WHAT
"the Dawn of Organic Chemistry" (DOC) is an Advanced Grant European Research Council (ERC) project (grant agreement No 741002) led by Prof. Cecilia Ceccarelli of the Institut de Planétologie et Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG), Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de Grenoble (OSUG) .

WHY
Terrestrial life is based on organic chemistry, on the complex combination of relatively small molecules containing less than 50 atoms of carbon and other elements in smaller quantities. Some of these bricks, notably amino acids, are found in meteoritic and cometary material, a fact (among others) which led the Nobel laureate C. de Duve to conclude that the seeds of life are universal and life is an obligatory manifestation of matter, written into the fabric of the Universe.

Of course, this is not by chance, but due to the electronic structure of C atoms and their abundance (not locked in refractory/rocky material). Thus it does not come as a surprise that the largest molecules detected in the interstellar medium (ISM), and those having more than five atoms, contain carbon. They are called iCOMs, for interstellar Complex Organic Molecules (Ceccarelli et al. 2017).

The goal of DOC is to move from a “stamp collection” to a “quantitative and predictive” phase of organic astrochemistry.

Specifically, the DOC objective is to understand the dawn of organic chemistry, namely the start of organic chemistry in systems similar to the progenitor of the Solar System, with the ultimate goal to understand how organic chemistry builds up and evolves in these systems and, consequently, to understand how universal the chemical seeds of life are.

To achieve this objective, DOC will build a reliable theory for the organic chemistry in nascent Solar type systems, by combining in a tightly coordinated way, astronomical observations, quantum chemistry computations, astrochemical/chemi-physical models and sophisticated analysis tools.
The general scheme of the project is illustrated in the figure below.

Updated on 19 September 2020