building blocks for life tagged posts

Even as detailed images of distant galaxies from the James Webb Space Telescope show us more of the greater universe, scientists still disagree about how life began here on Earth. One hypothesis is that meteorites delivered amino acids – life’s building blocks – to our planet. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have experimentally shown that amino acids could have formed in these early meteorites from reactions driven by gamma rays produced inside the space rocks.

Ever since Earth was a newly formed, sterile planet, meteorites have been hurtling through the atmosphere at high speeds toward its surface...

Rendering of part of a planetary system in orbit around a white dwarf star (the white spot at the center of the red ring). The foreground shows rocky asteroids; the red ring represents the rocky debris that remains of former asteroids or a minor planet that have already been broken apart by the strong gravity of the white dwarf. Credit: University of Warwick

Object in the constellation Boötes with C, H, O, N. Many scientists believe the Earth was dry when it first formed, and that the building blocks for life on our planet – carbon, nitrogen and water – appeared only later as a result of collisions with other objects in our solar system that had those elements...