Methanol

There are just weren't as many observations of deuterium fractions as we thought, but anyway, enough hedging.

The interesting thing was if you took the, if for, at least for evolutionary stages in deuterium fractions where there were enough samples to take a mean, we took the mean deuterium fraction and we found that, especially for D2CO, these means lined up shockingly well across these different evolutionary stages and, They lined up a little bit less well for HDCO over H2CO and CH2DOH over CH3OH, but those molecules just didn't have as many published observations.

So maybe those would line up better if we had more data to compare against.

But at the very least, it seems like there's some solid evidence pointing towards D2CO being inherited across these different evolutionary stages, which is pretty interesting, especially because there have been, um, there have been previous studies that also pointed towards a lot of these molecules being inherited from the very, very early stages of star formation.

I think the easiest way to see this is to take something like methane, which is CH4, right? It's this molecule that has a carbon in the middle and four hydrogens around it.

So then you go through some organic chemistry synthesis reaction and you create methyl alcohol with it, which is just CH3OH.

And so what you did is you added on a OH group, a hydroxyl.

group to this middle carbon well how does the oxidation state of that carbon change through the reaction was it oxidized was it reduced all you got to do is look at the number of bonds that it has to hydrogen and oxygen well what happened well you just gained a bond to oxygen and lost a bond to hydrogen so just from that i can say okay that middle carbon was oxidized and so i would just remember those shorthand rules and you know if it saves you a little bit of time on the mcat that's great So it should be pretty clear now as to why a redox reaction is called a redox reaction, right? You have one species getting oxidized, one species getting reduced.