An unusual laboratory experiment helped scientists prove that the basic building blocks of life - molecules of alcohols, sugars and amino acids - can arise in outer space from methane and other simple molecules when they collide with cosmic rays, according to an article published in the Journal of Chemical Physics.
“These reactions of molecular synthesis, we believe, could play a decisive role in biogenesis and the formation of the simplest 'building blocks of life' in the solar system, and be the key to the origin of life and chemical evolution of organic molecules in other parts of the universe,” write Sasan Esmaily (Sasan Esmaili) and colleagues from the University of Sherbrooke (Canada).
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 it could have been "brought" to our planet by asteroids and comets that bombarded the Earth's surface about 3.8 billion years ago.
Some oddities in the isotopic composition of water molecules in ancient comets, as well as recent data on the chemical composition of the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet, lead many scientists to assume that the lion's share of the primary "building blocks of life" of the solar system arose before its birth. The inevitable question arises - how such molecules could arise in the dark void of interstellar space without the light of the newborn Sun or other sources of energy.
Esmaily and his colleagues tried to find an answer to this question, suggesting that the source of such energy could be cosmic rays colliding with molecules of interstellar gas. They tested this idea by irradiating a mixture of small grains of ice, ammonia, carbon monoxide, hydrogen, the simplest hydrocarbons and other substances found in the primary matter of "stellar nurseries" - dense clouds of gas in which new stars and planets are born.
The role of cosmic rays was played by beams of electrons and photons of X-ray radiation, the power of which was selected in such a way that they corresponded in intensity to their real "cousins". From time to time, scientists exposed "interstellar matter" to magnetic fields and other types of radiation, simulating various processes that take place in outer space.
As these experiments showed quite quickly, molecules of acetylene, alcohols, aromatic hydrocarbons, sugars and many other "building blocks of life" began to appear inside the chamber, which, as scientists previously believed, could only arise inside future stellar systems.
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This, according to Esmaily and his colleagues, suggests that most of the reserves of the primary organic matter of the solar system could really have been born before the appearance of the sun and planets, as well as in the vicinity of other worlds recently discovered with Kepler and other telescopes.
