The large amount of organic matter in the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet indicates that virtually all the "building blocks" of life that they contain must have formed before the birth of the solar system and beyond, according to an article published in the journal MNRAS.
“We assume that the complex organic molecules that Rosetta found in the dust of comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko formed in the interstellar medium, inside structures that our colleagues call 'diffuse stripes'. These molecules have experienced a turbulent history of the formation of the solar system due to the fact that comets formed very gradually and calmly,”writes Jean-Loup Bertaux of the University of Versailles (France).
According to modern concepts, the Earth and other planets of the solar system were formed in the first several hundred million years of its life inside the gas and dust nebula that surrounded the newborn Sun. At the beginning of its life, the Earth was a red-hot ball, on the surface of which volatile elements and substances simply could not exist, including water, carbon and nitrogen compounds, as well as organic “building blocks of life”.
The question arises why then all these substances are found on the surface of the Earth and in the earth's crust in great abundance. On this score, scientists have several theories, and, for example, the presence of water on Earth is explained by the fact that asteroids and comets that bombarded the Earth's surface about 3.8 billion years ago could have brought it to our planet.
Berto and his colleague Rosine Lallement of the Paris Observatory (France) tried to understand where organic matter came from on Earth by studying the data collected by the Rosetta probe during its work in the orbit of the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet.
One of the distinguishing features of this comet, as the measurements of the Rosetta itself and its lander Phila showed, was that its bowels contained an unusually large amount of organic matter - about 40% of its mass was dust and various “building blocks of life”. This discovery came as a big surprise to scientists, as they expected that organic matter simply would not have had time to accumulate in the primary matter of the solar system before the "embryos" of comets were formed.
This fact, as well as some peculiarities in the chemical composition of the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet, prompted Berto and Lallemen to think that all the “building blocks of life” could be a kind of space “aliens” - they could have appeared in the interstellar medium long before the birth of the Sun and entered the “embryo The solar system is much later.
The source of this organic matter is most likely the so-called "diffuse stripes" - relatively dense and very cold accumulations of gas in the interstellar medium, in which organic matter is formed under the action of cosmic rays and the ultraviolet glow of distant stars. These bands were discovered more than 20 years ago, and since then, scientists have found many complex organic molecules in them, including the first "cosmic" fullerenes, nanospheres of 60 carbon atoms.
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This theory can only be tested if a sample of comet matter is delivered to Earth and scientists can calculate the fractions of isotopes of hydrogen and other elements, whose concentrations are very different for the solar system and the interstellar medium. Scientists hope that in the near future NASA, ESA and other space agencies will create a successor to Rosetta, which will solve this problem.
