The question of the origin of life has attracted the interest of researchers for centuries. Recent theories contemplate the possibility that a fraction of the prebiotic material essential for the origin of life could have originated exogenously and been transferred to a young Earth via planetesimal impact on its surface. Prebiotic molecules such as amino acids, nucleobases and sugars have indeed been detected in meteorites and in comets, which supports the latter hypothesis.

Our group focuses on investigating what organic compounds can form in the interstellar medium, both in molecular clouds and and in star- and planet-forming regions. Our immediate goal is to detect molecular precursors of theories of the origin of life such as the primordial RNA-world. In recent years, we have discovered a number of molecular species of related to RNA-wold chemical schemes such as hydroxylamine (Rivilla et al. 2020), glycolonitrile (Zeng et al. 2019), ethanolamine (Rivilla et al. 2021), and propanol (Jiménez-Serra et al. 2022) among others. We are also experts in the physical processes related to the formation of stars (both low-mass and high-mass) in the Galaxy and in external galaxies.