The signal from the molecule, hydroxylamine, which is made up of atoms of nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen, still needs to be verified.
If confirmed, it would mean scientists have found a chemical that could potentially seed life on other worlds, and may have played a role in life's origin on our home planet about 3.6 billion years ago, 'LiveScience' reported.
"It's very exciting," said Stefanie Milam, an astrochemist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.
"This will be the first detection of this new molecule. It gives us a lot of hope for prebiotic chemistry in this particular region," researchers said.
Some astronomers think that the ingredients for life are formed in cold, gas, dust and plasma-filled interstellar clouds. Comets, asteroids and meteors forming in these clouds bear such chemicals, and as they continually bombard planets, they could have deposited the chemicals on Earth or other worlds, said Anthony Remijan, who led the research.
So while life may have emerged from hydrothermal vents on Earth - a theory that many scientists support - the molecules that eventually transformed into the earliest life forms had to come from somewhere, and that "somewhere" may have been space.
In order to test this theory, astronomers look for the chemical fingerprints of simple, inorganic compounds forming in interstellar clouds.
These compounds aren't life or even carbon-based, but they can react with other molecules to form some of the building blocks of life, such as amino acids or the nucleotides that make up DNA.
In recent years, scientists have found several different prebiotic molecules in space, said Brett McGuire, doctoral candidate in chemistry and chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology.
Remijan and colleagues, in the hunt for these molecules, scanned a star-forming region of the Milky Way called L1157-B1 using the Combined Array for Research in Millimetre-wave Astronomy (CARMA).
They found a very weak signal of hydroxylamine, which makes sense since, inside L1157-B1, a violent gas jet is slamming into the interstellar media, the shock from this gas outflow would be sufficient force to trigger these chemical reactions in the otherwise frigid depths of an interstellar cloud.
Hydroxylamine could react with other compounds, such as acetic acid, to form amino acids that could be dumped onto other worlds during space-rock collisions.
"We have some very preliminary evidence of its detection, a very weak signal that kind of looks like a line," McGuire said.
