2023-05-11 11:45:38
Stellar flares can make planets orbiting the emitting star uninhabitable. Might they also have the ability to create conditions suitable for life on worlds where their effects are felt? Did the eruptions of the Sun contribute to preparing the stage in which life appeared on Earth? An investigation has delved into these questions, seeking answers.
To unravel the origin of life on Earth, many scientists try to explain how amino acids, the raw material from which proteins and all cellular life are formed, were formed. The best-known proposal originated in the late 19th century, when scientists speculated that life began in a “little hot pool”: a “soup” of chemicals, energized by lightning, solar heat, and other sources. of energy, which could be mixed in concentrated amounts to form organic molecules.
In 1953, Stanley Miller of the University of Chicago tried to recreate these early conditions in the laboratory. Miller filled a closed chamber with methane, ammonia, water, and molecular hydrogen—gases thought to have predominated in Earth’s early atmosphere—and repeatedly sparked an electric spark to simulate lightning. A week later, Miller and his colleague Harold Urey analyzed the contents of the chamber and found that 20 different amino acids had been formed.
But the last 70 years have complicated this interpretation. It is now believed that ammonia (NH3) and methane (CH4) were much less abundant; instead, Earth’s air was filled with carbon dioxide (CO2) and molecular nitrogen (N2), which require more energy to break down. These gases can still produce amino acids, but in greatly reduced amounts.
Artist’s recreation of the primitive Earth. (Illustration: NASA)
In search of alternative energy sources, some scientists turned to the shock waves of meteorites. Others invoked solar ultraviolet radiation. Using data collected by NASA’s Kepler mission, the team led by Kensei Kobayashi of Yokohama National University in Japan and Vladimir Airapetian of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in the United States came up with a new candidate: energetic particles from our Sun.
Experiments by the team show how solar particles, when colliding with gases in Earth’s early atmosphere, can form amino acids and carboxylic acids, the building blocks of proteins and organic life. In other words, the results of the new study indicate that there is a high probability that the first building blocks of life on Earth were formed by flares from our Sun.
The study is titled “Formation of Amino Acids and Carboxylic Acids in Weakly Reducing Planetary Atmospheres by Solar Energetic Particles from the Young Sun”. And it has been published in the academic journal Life. (Fountain: NCYT de Amazings)
#Solar #flares #hidden #actor #beginning #life #Earth