Astronomers find likely traces of chemical precursor to life
15 Jan 2013 6:00 AM IST
Astronomers may have found tentative traces of a precursor chemical to the building blocks of life, near a star-forming region about 1,000 light-years from Earth.
The signal from the molecule, hydroxylamine, which is made up of atoms of nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen, still needs to be verified. If confirmed, it would mean scientists have found a chemical that could potentially seed life on other worlds, and may have played a role in life's origin on our home planet about 3.6 billion years ago, 'LiveScience' reported.
‘It's very exciting,’ said Stefanie Milam, an astrochemist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.
‘This will be the first detection of this new molecule. It gives us a lot of hope for prebiotic chemistry in this particular region,’ researchers said. Some astronomers think that the ingredients for life are formed in cold, gas, dust and plasma-filled interstellar clouds. Comets, asteroids and meteors forming in these clouds bear such chemicals, and as they continually bombard planets, they could have deposited the chemicals on Earth or other worlds, said Anthony Remijan, who led the research.
So while life may have emerged from hydrothermal vents on Earth - a theory that many scientists support - the molecules that eventually transformed into the earliest life forms had to come from somewhere, and that ‘somewhere’ may have been space.
The signal from the molecule, hydroxylamine, which is made up of atoms of nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen, still needs to be verified. If confirmed, it would mean scientists have found a chemical that could potentially seed life on other worlds, and may have played a role in life's origin on our home planet about 3.6 billion years ago, 'LiveScience' reported.
‘It's very exciting,’ said Stefanie Milam, an astrochemist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.
‘This will be the first detection of this new molecule. It gives us a lot of hope for prebiotic chemistry in this particular region,’ researchers said. Some astronomers think that the ingredients for life are formed in cold, gas, dust and plasma-filled interstellar clouds. Comets, asteroids and meteors forming in these clouds bear such chemicals, and as they continually bombard planets, they could have deposited the chemicals on Earth or other worlds, said Anthony Remijan, who led the research.
So while life may have emerged from hydrothermal vents on Earth - a theory that many scientists support - the molecules that eventually transformed into the earliest life forms had to come from somewhere, and that ‘somewhere’ may have been space.
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