Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. A comet swept through the solar system carrying a strange chemical recipe -- one that has astronomers taking a closer look at what kinds of worlds might form around distant stars.

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have detected unusually large amounts of methanol, a simple alcohol, in interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS -- levels that exceed those seen in almost all known comets from our own solar system.