A study published in the journal life They discovered that cosmic rays from super-energy solar planets could provide the boost needed for life on Earth.
By firing charged particles found in the solar wind into a mixture of gases that were present in Earth’s early atmosphere, scientists have found that the components combine to form large quantities of amino acids and carboxylic acids – the building blocks of proteins and all forms of organic life.
“Galactic cosmic rays are ignored by most researchers because they require specialized equipment such as particle accelerators,” said the study’s lead author Kensei Kobayashi, a professor of chemistry at Yokohama National University in Japan. advertisement. “I was fortunate enough to have access to several of them near our facilities.”
What are solar “superflares”.
Stars generate strong magnetic fields, caused by the flow of electric charges in the molten plasma that runs along and below their surfaces. These magnetic field lines snap in folds before suddenly breaking, releasing energy in bursts of radiation called solar flares and jets of solar material called coronal mass ejections (CMEs).
When this matter — made up mostly of electrons, protons, and alpha particles — collides with Earth’s magnetic field, it triggers geomagnetic storms, which excite the particles in the atmosphere, creating colorful lights known as aurora borealis.
The largest solar storm in modern history was the Carrington Event, which occurred in 1859, which released energy equivalent to 10 billion 1-megaton atomic bombs. However, even this incident was overshadowed by the power of the super-explosion, which could be hundreds to thousands of times more violent.
Currently, this type of eruption only happens once every 100 years or so, but that wasn’t always the case. By analyzing data from NASA’s Kepler mission, which between 2009 and 2018 collected data on Earth-like planets and their stars, a study published in 2016 in the journal. Natural Earth Sciences He showed that during the first 100 million years of the Earth’s life, although the Sun was 30% weaker, the superplanets erupted from its surface every three to ten days.
Read more:
How was the experiment conducted?
To test the role that supernovae might play in the formation of amino acids on Earth, the researchers incorporated carbon dioxide, molecular nitrogen, water, and a varying amount of methane into a mixture of gases that would have been present in the early atmosphere.
Then, by firing the proton-gas mixture from a small particle accelerator, as well as igniting them with simulated chips, the scientists triggered the production of amino acids and carboxylic acids—both essential chemical requirements for life.
As methane levels increased, so did the amino acids and carboxylic acids produced by both protons and rays, but to generate them at detectable levels, the proton mixture needed only 0.5% methane concentration, while the detonators needed 15%.
“Even at 15% methane, the rate of production of amino acids by lightning is a million times lower than that of protons,” said study co-author Vladimir Ayrapetyan, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who also worked on the 2016 study. “During cold conditions, you never get lightning, and the early Earth was under a very weak sun. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t come from lightning, but lightning seems less likely now, and solar particles much more likely.”
Have you seen the new videos on Youtube digital outlook? Subscribe in the channel!
“Writer. Analyst. Avid travel maven. Devoted twitter guru. Unapologetic pop culture expert. General zombie enthusiast.”
