Cecilia Ceccarelli

Host Institution: UGA

Lab: IPAG

Call for Projects: Advanced (PE9)

Project name: DOC – Dawn of Organic Chemistry

Amount: €2.45m

Description :

Life on Earth is based on organic chemistry, on the complex combination of molecules containing relatively small less than 50 carbon atoms and other elements in smaller quantities.

Some of these building blocks, notably amino acids, are found in meteoritic and cometary material, a fact (among other things) which led Nobel laureate C. de Duve to conclude that “the germs of life are universal” and “life is an obligatory manifestation “of matter, inscribed in the fabric of the Universe”.

The objective of the DOC project is to understand the dawn of organic chemistry, namely the beginning of organic chemistry in systems similar to the ancestor of the solar system, with the ultimate goal of understanding how organic chemistry is integrated and evolve in these systems and, therefore, to understand how universal the chemical germs of life are.

To achieve this goal, I propose to construct a reliable theory for organic chemistry in nascent solar-like systems, by combining in a coordinated fashion groundbreaking new astronomical observations, quantum chemical calculations, astrochemical/chemical-physical models and sophisticated analysis tools.

The DOC project is based on (i) a wealth of first-class data from large, award-winning programs at IRAM and a plethora of smaller proposals at IRAM, ALMA and APEX, (ii) new cutting-edge quantum chemistry calculations to understand astrochemical reactions at the molecular level, and (iii) models and tools to exploit new data and calculations.

My ambition is to provide a reliable theory not only for the astrochemical and star- and planet-forming communities, but also for the extragalactic one.

Indeed, new highly sensitive spectral observations from facilities like IRAM, ALMA and, in the future, SKA will inevitably contain lines from many organic molecules.

DOC’s ambition is to eventually enable us to understand how organic chemistry takes place in the Universe.