New research has found that interstellar clouds may have played a significant role in creating the conditions that helped create the building blocks of life.
Amino acids, which are a key ingredient of life, could have originally been made in interstellar molecular clouds like that from which the solar system formed, before winding up in asteroids that later crashed on Earth, bringing the amino acids with them.
Carbonaceous chondrite meteorites are rich in amino acids and amines (the latter are nitrogen-bearing organic compounds) that are crucial components of proteins and biological cells in life on Earth. Understanding where and how amino acids formed is therefore important in better understanding the origin of life.
Scientists led by Danna Qasim of the South-west Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, Texas, and Christopher Materese of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have taken a big step towards figuring out where amino acids and amines form in space by creating them in a lab under “asteroid relevant conditions.”
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Many studies have focused on trying to simulate the formation of amino acids in carbonaceous chondrites, which are meteorites from carbon-rich asteroids that formed at the dawn of the solar system, 4.5 billion years ago. Qasim’s and Materese’s research takes things even farther back in time to the interstellar cloud of molecular gas and dust from which the sun and planets eventually formed.
“The make-up of asteroids originated from the parental interstellar molecular cloud, which was rich in organics,” said Qasim in a statement (opens in new tab) from SwRI. “While there is no direct evidence of amino acids in interstellar clouds, there is evidence of amines. The molecular cloud could have provided the amino acids in asteroids, which passed them on to meteorites.”
So Qasim set about replicating conditions in interstellar clouds to try and form amino acids. She used ices such as ammonia, carbon dioxide, methanol and water that are commonly found in interstellar clouds, and bombarded them with high-energy protons from a Van de Graff generator to replicate the ices being irradiated in space by cosmic rays. The proton bombardment smashed the ice molecules apart, the component parts then reassembling themselves as more complex organic molecules, including amines and amino acids such as ethylamine and glycine, in what Qasim calls an “organic residue” — a…
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