Stellar nurseries carry the stuff of life, long before stars

Organic compounds in nearby protostellar clouds point to star-planet evolution.

ESA/Herschel/NASA/JPL-Caltech; R. Hurt (JPL-Caltech), CC BY-SA IGO 3.0

This mosaic of the Taurus Molecular Cloud is made from observations of nearby pre-stellar clouds, located 450 light-years from Earth. Young stars like HL Tauri — about 3 million years old — call these stellar nurseries home. But…