Scientists have found chemical compounds associated to life frozen in ice outside of the Milky Way galaxy for the first time in history. A report that was out in the Astrophysical Journal Letters on October 20, 2025, says that the chemicals were located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf galaxy next to ours, around a new star.
Marta Sewilo from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland led an international research team that found many complex organic compounds (COMs) in ice form. These included ethanol, acetaldehyde, and methyl formate. The scientists also detected acetic acid, which is even more amazing because it is the first time this substance has ever been found in ice anywhere in space.
These compounds are very important for prebiotic chemistry, which is the study of how life might have started.
Sewilo added, “Right now, we only have one source in the Large Magellanic Cloud and four sources in the Milky Way where we can find these complex organic molecules in ices.” We need bigger samples from both galaxies to confirm our first findings that show disparities in the amounts of COM in these two galaxies. But this discovery has helped us learn a lot more about how complex chemistry forms in the universe and has opened up new areas of investigation into how life began.
NASA helped with the study, which was called “Protostars at Subsolar Metallicity: First Detection of Large Solid-State Complex Organic Molecules in the Large Magellanic Cloud.”
Scientists claim this discovery supports the idea that the building blocks of life are not limited to our solar system or even our galaxy. Instead, the basic building blocks of life may be found all around the universe, which means that life might potentially develop in a wide range of settings.
This discovery also gives us fresh information about how sophisticated organic chemistry may form and live through the extreme conditions of deep space during the early stages of star formation.