Science, Space and Technology News 2024
Before life on Earth, essential organic molecules were formed from scarce elements like nitrogen, sulphur, carbon, and phosphorus. New research suggests that cosmic dust, rich in these elements, could have jump-started prebiotic chemistry by accumulating in high concentrations on Earth, particularly in ice sheet melt holes, potentially leading to the formation of life’s building blocks.
This dust is created in space, for example when asteroids collide with each other. Even today, around 30,000 tonnes of dust still fall to Earth from space each year. In the early days of the Earth, however, the dust rained down in much greater volumes, amounting to millions of tonnes per year. Above all, however, the dust particles contain a lot of nitrogen, carbon, sulfur, and phosphorus. They would therefore have the potential to set a chemical cascade in motion.
Their simulations show that there could have been places on the early Earth with an extremely high concentration of cosmic dust. And that supplies were constantly replenished from space. However, the dust rains decreased rapidly and sharply after the formation of the Earth: after 500 million years, the dust flow was an order of magnitude smaller than in the year zero. The researchers attribute occasional upward spikes to asteroids that broke apart and sent a tail of dust toward the Earth.
It is quite possible that chemical processes got underway even at the icy temperatures that prevail in the melt holes: “Cold doesn’t disrupt organic chemistry – on the contrary: reactions are more selective and specific at low temperatures than at high temperatures,” Walton says. Other researchers have shown in the lab that simple ring-shaped ribonucleic acids form spontaneously in such meltwater soups at temperatures around freezing and then replicate themselves.
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