How did life arise on earth? This is perhaps one of the greatest mysteries of all time.
One theory is that it is necessary building blocks” It came from space.
Now a new study is giving weight to this theory.
It was Japanese researchers who made a surprising discovery. They studied meteorites, and found within these rocks four important components needed to create life.
The new study was published in Nature Communications.
billions of years
Scientists have analyzed three meteorites rich in carbon:
The Murchison meteorite that landed in Australia in 1969, the Murray meteorite that landed in the United States in 1950, and the Lake Tagish meteorite that landed in Canada in 2000.
All of these rocks hit Earth recently, but scientists still think they’re very old. Huge boulders may have existed in space even before the advent of our solar system. This happened 4.6 billion years ago.
In these three meteorites, the necessary substances that can make DNA and RNA have now been found.
A number of meteorites also fell in Norway. Most of them are in Oslo in the Museum of Natural History.
Photo: Shad Madian/NRK
“A wonderful find”
to DNA and RNA In order to be formed, two types of organic compounds are needed. These are called nucleobases, and they are made up of pyrimidines and purines.
Pyrimidines include substances such as cytosine, uracil, and thymine. Purines include guanine and adenine.
Previous studies found purines and uracil in meteorites, but they were never found in cytosine and thymine.
For now.
Yasuhiro Oba of Hokkaido University calls it a great find.
This means that such nuclear bases may have appeared before life began on Earth. They may have played a role in the growth of genetic functions, the researcher says in a press release.
He thinks it’s impossible to find answers
Hans EF Amundsen is a geologist who has researched organic compounds in meteorites.
He thinks the results are interesting, but he still thinks we’re far from the result. Because even if you had the building blocks, a geologist thinks it would be nearly impossible to find out How do Life arose on our planet.
– We don’t know for sure when It happened once. You don’t know for sure until you find fossils of things similar to something that could bite you in the finger. He told NRK that you have pointers, but you don’t know.
According to a geologist, it is very difficult to know whether life originated on our planet or not It came to Earth from somewhere else in the solar system.
What can be said with certainty is that carbon-rich chondrites (a type of meteorite) contain organic compounds that could serve as the building blocks of life.
Earth was initially created from dust from the same carbon-rich materials Chondrite They coalesced together and grew into planets. When the Earth formed, Amundsen explains, it contained the same materials found in these meteorites.
But how could these organic compounds, so important to all life, have arisen in the first place?
The image shows single-stranded RNA and double-stranded DNA. Both with their nuclear bases.
Photo: Wikipedia
very long ago
About 18 billion km from Earth is the boundary between the solar system and the so-called interstellar space – interstellar space.
according to These organic compounds are said to have been created by Yasuhiro Oba by optical Reactions to rocks floating in faraway places in the universe.
This must have happened long before these building blocks were integrated into asteroids and formed our solar system.
But perhaps by hiking with meteorites, which often hit the Earth during its early formation, The researchers wrote that these organic compounds may have been what was needed to start the evolution of life.
For better answers Samples from two asteroids, named Ryugu and Bennu, must also be analyzed. The content of these is likely to be able to further strengthen the theory.
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