Cometary Impacts May Have Provided Key Elements of Life 85
trendspotter writes with news of research indicating that impact events might be responsible for seeding the Earth with reactive forms of the precursors to amino acids. From the article: "Early Earth was not very hospitable when it came to jump starting life. In fact, new research shows that life on Earth may have come from out of this world. Lawrence Livermore scientist Nir Goldman and University of Ontario Institute of Technology colleague Isaac Tamblyn (a former LLNL postdoc) found that icy comets that crashed into Earth millions of years ago could have produced life building organic compounds, including the building blocks of proteins and nucleobases pairs of DNA and RNA. Comets contain a variety of simple molecules, such as water, ammonia, methanol and carbon dioxide, and an impact event with a planetary surface would provide an abundant supply of energy to drive chemical reactions."
The paper (PDF).
Comets are nothing but Intergalactic Spermatazoa (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Informative)
The idea that comets might be the source of early prebiotic components is old, but this specific research demonstrating that the high pressures and temperatures involved in impacts is capable of converting the simple, common molecules found on comets into more complex prebiotic structures is new.
Re:Except.. (Score:2, Informative)
I know that reading TFA is not in fashion on /. but can you at least read the summary? It says, "..that icy comets that crashed into Earth millions of years ago could have produced life building organic compounds." That's what I was pointing out. Sheesh.
Re:Except.. (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I for one am extremely unfashionable and actually RTFA:
"The flux of organic matter to Earth via comets and asteroids during periods of heavy bombardment may have been as high as 10 trillion kilograms per year, delivering up to several orders of magnitude greater mass of organics than what likely pre-existed on the planet," Goldman said.
The words "heavy bombardment" have particular meaning in the context of solar system history; the most well-known being the (not quite ubiquitously accepted) Late Heavy Bombardment [wikipedia.org], on the moon, 4.1–3.8 billion years ago. The bit about "millions of years ago" was probably added by the public relations science writer and should have been "billions." They get this stuff wrong all the time.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, I don't know what's new about this.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16215-meteor-impacts-may-have-sparked-life-on-earth.html [newscientist.com]
"Yoshihiro Furukawa... used a high-velocity propellant gun to simulate the impacts of ordinary carbon-containing chondrite meteorites .... recovered a variety of organic molecules, including fatty acids, amines, and an amino acid."
There was a multi-part Nova episode called "Origins" where they also demonstrated this. I can't remember the scientist or laboratory, but they put some simple organic compounds inside a metal plug and then fired a high speed projectile into it (or maybe they fired the plug into a target?). When they opened the container, they found that they had created more complex compounds like amino acids. It looked like a translucent liquid at first, and came out looking like dark slime.