visualising extraterrestrial molecules

I cover atomic force microscopy every once in a while, which results from my residual connections in chemistry and interest in the nanoworld, and because of the astrobiology book I am of course interested in all extraterrestrial molecules.

So the great news is that now these two threads of my work have met and I have been able to report the first AFM work on actual extraterrestrial molecules, which is really exciting, even though it hasn't taught us anything fundamentally new - except that you can visualise extraterrestrial molecules. So anybody who has meteorite materials, send a sample to my namesake Leo Gross, and he will get you lovely pictures of the organic molecules contained in them.

Read all about it on the Chemistry World website (open access if you restrain yourself and don't read more than two stories per month):

Chemical ecosystem of Murchison meteorite molecules revealed in snapshots