There's a sweet spot for potentially life-giving molecules in the universe, and it's called IRAS 16293-2422.

Astronomers have identified a second building block for life in the awkwardly named star system, where previous analysis found sugar in 2012. Their findings were released Thursday in two separate papers.

The newly detected prebiotic molecule is called methyl isocyanate, which is part of a family of molecules that form the peptide bonds necessary for organic proteins.

Although methyl isocyanate is deadly to humans, astronomers say it nonetheless offers hints as to how life emerges around young stars like our own sun.

"By finding prebiotic molecules in this study, we may now have another piece of the puzzle in understanding how life came about on our planet," Rafael Martin-Domenech and Victor M. Rivilla, co-authors of one of the papers, said in a statement.

The discovery comes just five years after astronomers found the sugar glycolaldehyde, a building block for RNA, in the same system.

The sun-like star IRAS 16293-2422 is still quite young at just 10,000 years old, and is approximately 400 light years from Earth. Our sun, by comparison, is 4.6 billion years old. It's estimated that life emerged on Earth approximately 3.8 billion years ago, when the sun was 800,000 years old.

Niels Ligterink and Audrey Coutens, who co-authored a second paper on the discovery, touted IRAS 16293-2422 as a prime spot to look for early elements of life. "This star systems seems to keep on giving," they said in a joint statement.

Astronomers detected the methyl isocyanate using the ALMA telescope in Chile.

The molecule was also detected on an icy comet back in 2015 by the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe.