Goals

The ingredients for the recipe to make a “habitable” planet like our own Earth are: a relatively small rocky planet, at the right distance from the host star, with a not too thick atmosphere rich in volatiles and capable of developing interstellar complex organic molecules (iCOMs) chemistry. Searches for exoplanets have shown a large degree of diversity in the planetary systems, and as yet is unclear how common a System like our own is. Understanding the formation of planetary systems and the chemical processing of the volatiles that will form their atmospheres is key to understand the origins of the Solar System and how common the “habitable” planet outcome may be. More specifically key questions still to be addressed are: how chemically complex are the volatiles delivered on the pristine planetary atmospheres? What molecules are passed from the large-scale envelope to the disk in which planets, comets, and asteroids form?

To understand how much of this molecular complexity develops during the formation of stars and is available in the disks for delivery on the pristine planet surfaces (Codella+ 2015). This requires spatial scales < 50 au.

In the GENESIS-SKA context, we obtained the large program ALMA FAUST (co-PI: C. Codella; http://stars.riken.jp/faust/fausthome.html), the first and so far unique ALMA large program on astrochemistry (iCOMs and light C-chains: C_nX, n<3; HC_2n+1N, n<3) of protostellar and protoplanetary regions (15 Class 0/I sources, three frequency set-ups; at 220-260 GHz).