... Cosmic Adventures . ... NASA develops key to cosmic carbonт??s molecular evolution . ... Between 2003 and 2005, thanks to its unprecedented sensitivity, NASAт??s Spitzer Space Telescope created maps of the tell-tale PAH signature across large regions of space. ... Since PAHs are so sensitive to local conditions, analyzing the PAH bands, as we did here, represents a powerful new astronomical tool to trace the evolution of cosmic carbon and, at the same time, probe conditions across the universe. ...