According to recent study, powerful solar storms may have brought the first
components of life to Earth.
According to a recent research, massive superflares from a young,
hyperactive sun may have ignited the origin of life on Earth.
Scientists discovered that a mixture of gases present in Earth's early
atmosphere forms considerable amounts of amino acids and carboxylic acids —
the building blocks for proteins and all organic life — when charged
particles from the solar wind are fired at the mixture.
Since the 1800s, when it was hypothesized that life may have started in an
ancient chemical soup known as a "warm little pond," scientists have been
perplexed by the circumstances that gave rise to life on Earth. In the
1950s, research involving artificial lightning exposure to gas combinations
of methane, ammonia, water, and molecular hydrogen revealed that 20 distinct
amino acids were produced as a result of the procedure.
But the situation has become more difficult in the intervening years.
Scientists discovered that the early Earth's atmosphere included more carbon
dioxide and molecular nitrogen and less ammonia and methane than previously
believed. Both of these gases require far more energy to disintegrate than
lightning alone could supply.
The crucial kick-start for life on Earth may have been delivered by cosmic
rays from very violent superflares, according to a recent study that was
just published on April 28 in the journal
Life.
As the primary study author,
Kensei Kobayashi
is a professor of chemistry at Yokohama National University in Japan. "Most
investigators ignore galactic cosmic rays because they require specialized
equipment, like particle accelerators," he
stated in a release. "I had access to several of them close to our facilities, which was
fortunate."
Due to the passage of electrical charges in the molten plasma that flows
along and beneath the surfaces of stars, these objects produce strong
magnetic fields. These magnetic field lines can occasionally form kinks
before abruptly snapping, unleashing energy in the form of solar flares and
coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are explosive jets of solar
material.
The collision of this solar material, which largely consists of electrons,
protons, and alpha particles, with the magnetic field of Earth causes a
geomagnetic storm, which stirs up molecules in our atmosphere to produce the
northern lights. Even though the 1859 Carrington Event was the biggest solar
storm in recorded history, with energy equivalent to 10 billion 1-megaton
atomic bombs, it was overshadowed by the force of a superflare, which may be
hundreds to thousands of times more powerful.
These superflares normally only occur once every 100 years or so, but it's
possible that wasn't always the case. Superflares burst from the sun's
surface every three to ten days during Earth's first 100 million years,
according to a
2016 study published in the journal Nature Geoscience
that examined data from NASA's Kepler mission, which between 2009 and 2018
collected data on Earth-like planets and their stars.
The researchers in the current study mixed carbon dioxide, molecular
nitrogen, water, and different concentrations of methane into mixes of gases
they may anticipate to find in our early atmosphere in order to see the role
superflares may have had in producing amino acids on ancient Earth. Then,
the researchers either ignited the gas mixtures with simulated lightning or
shot them with protons from a tiny particle accelerator (known as a tandem
accelerator) to trigger the formation of amino acids and carboxylic acids,
both of which are crucial chemical building blocks for life.
The amino acids and carboxylic acids produced by both the protons and the
lightning strikes rose when the methane concentration was raised, however
the proton combination only required 0.5% methane concentration to produce
them at detectable levels while the lightning discharges required 15%.
"And even at 15% methane, the production rate of the amino acids by
lightning is a million times less than by protons," said research co-author
Vladimir Airapetian, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and co-author of
a 2016 Nature Geosciences study. Lightning never occurs in cold weather, and
the sun in the early Earth's history was quite dim. Although solar particles
appear to be more plausible than lightning at the moment, it is not to
suggest that it couldn't have come from lightning.
