Life on Earth may have been created by giant eruptions from the sun

Life on Earth may have originated thanks to giant explosions from the Sun, According to a new study. According to NASA, a series of chemical experiments is showing how particles from the sun, colliding with gases in our planet’s early atmosphere, can form amino acids and carboxylic acids, the building blocks of proteins and organic life. This discovery was published in the scientific journal Life.

The raw material of life

To understand the origin of life, science tries to explain how amino acids, the raw materials for proteins and all forms of cellular life, were formed. The most famous suggestion arose in the late nineteenth century, when researchers speculated Life could begin on a “warm little lake”: A soup of chemicals, activated by lightning, heat, and other energy sources, that can mix together in concentrated amounts to form organic molecules.

In 1953, Stanley Miller of the University of Chicago attempted to recreate these primordial conditions in the laboratory. The scientist filled a sealed chamber with methane, ammonia, water and molecular hydrogen (gases thought to be prevalent in Earth’s early atmosphere) and lit an electric spark repeatedly to simulate lightning. A week later, Miller and his advisor, Harold Urey, analyzed the contents of the chamber and found that 20 different amino acids had formed.

But research over the past 70 years has challenged this theory. Scientists now believe that ammonia (NH3) and methane (CH4) were less abundant. Instead, Earth’s air was filled with carbon dioxide (CO2) and molecular nitrogen (N2), which require more energy to decompose. These gases can still produce amino acids, but in very low amounts.

Now, Vladimir Irapetyan, a NASA stellar astrophysicist and co-author of the new study, has used data from the Kepler mission and suggested that The energy needed to create life would come from particles in our sun. His study indicates that supersolar planets release particles near the speed of light that regularly collide with our atmosphere, setting off chemical reactions.

In another experiment, Airapetian and his collaborators created a mixture of gases similar to those in early Earth’s atmosphere. To do this, they combined carbon dioxide, molecular nitrogen, water, and a varying amount of methane. Then they fired protons (which simulate solar particles) into the gas mixtures or ignited them with a spark discharge (simulating lightning). The experiment yielded detectable amounts of amino acids and carboxylic acids. This indicates that our Sun, when it was young, could have catalyzed the elements of life easier and faster than previously thought.