HILO, Hawai'i — The powerful telescopes on Mauna Kea have confirmed that a disk of dust and hot gases surrounding an infant star forming near our solar system is rich in two compounds needed for organic molecules and DNA.

The discovery offers a new hint at how life might have emerged on Earth. The compounds are common in our own solar system.

The study of the star and the disk around it marks the first time that molecules of acetylene and hydrogen cyanide have been found in another system that seems to be developing in a similar manner as our own.

The forming star and the dust belt together are known as IRS 46, and make up a system that "might look a lot like ours did billions of years ago, before life arose on Earth," said Fred Lahuis of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, in a statement released by the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology. Lahuis is the lead author of a paper describing the results that will be published in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Combined with water, and under the right conditions, acetylene and hydrogen cyanide can interact to produce a variety of organic compounds such as amino acids and adenine. Adenine is a component of both DNA and RNA, two nucleic acids sometimes described as the "building blocks" of living organisms.

Astronomers studied the light that passes through the dust and gas to reach Earth, and were able to determine the composition of the particles in the disk by studying the wavelengths or colors of the light.

"What they found are the very, very, very basic building blocks for organic molecules," said Marc Kassis, support astronomer at the W.M. Keck Observatory.

Researchers also used data from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea to try to determine exactly where in the disk the gas containing the organic compounds is concentrated.

The findings offer hard evidence in support of some theoretical models of the early chemistry of solar systems. Those models predict that large amounts of complex organic molecules would be found in the innermost regions of the disks orbiting such stars, and the IRS 46 observations offered scientists an opportunity to test those theories.

IRS 46 is about 375 light years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus, part of our Milky Way galaxy.

Reach Kevin Dayton at kdayton@honoluluadvertiser.com.