The building blocks of life can form rapidly around young stars

[Admin]

Astronomers may have solved the mystery of how the complex building blocks of life first formed, finding dust traps around young stars could make an ideal formation location.

The building blocks of life can form rapidly around young stars : Read more

 

[rod]

An interesting report on how dust and starlight can work together to create the stuff of life I note from the opening in the report:

"Scientists have long queried how the complex molecules needed for life could have formed around the tumultuous and violent environment of the sun in its youth. A family of meteorites called "chondrites" is theorized to have delivered the right stuff for life to Earth. But the question is, how did complex organic molecules containing elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen come to be sealed in these meteorites in the first place? New research suggests that the "hot spot" for the formation of these macromolecules, the essential building blocks of life, may be so-called "dust traps" in swirling disks of matter around infant stars. Here, intense starlight from the central young star could irradiate the accumulating ice and dust to form carbon-containing macromolecules in just decades, which is relatively rapid."

Should abiogenesis doctrine which I begin in 1871 with Charles Darwin warm little pond letter, start the paradigm in the dust clouds and meteorites for the origin of life? IMO, yes so catastrophism and fortuitous collisions and events are needed. However, getting those "carbon-containing macromolecules" converted into life remains another problem in the origin of life model using abiogenesis.

How stars' magnetic fields could impact the chance for life on orbiting planets, https://forums.space.com/threads/ho...he-chance-for-life-on-orbiting-planets.67469/

 

[Unclear Engineer]

The words "macro molecules containing carbon" are really vague, compared to "building blocks of life". I would like to see some specific examples of the macro molecules that are being called "building blocks of life" so that I have some idea about how complex they are and how far along the path to the basics for life and DNA/RNA proteins these cosmic molecules can get.

 

[skynr13]

What I'd like to know from this is, first they have substantiated the idea these carbon/organic molecules were created in dust clouds in proto planet formation, but do these molecules survive the heating and magma formation when the proto planet eventually becomes a planet? If so, then life on Earth formed on Earth and not from some meteor that happened to plop down here.

 

[skynr13]

The words "macro molecules containing carbon" are really vague, compared to "building blocks of life". I would like to see some specific examples of the macro molecules that are being called "building blocks of life" so that I have some idea about how complex they are and how far along the path to the basics for life and DNA/RNA proteins these cosmic molecules can get.

Yes, they have found in the dust grains from asteroid sample missions that amino acids and some proteins form on asteroids around our solar system and possibly RNA.

 

[billslugg]

What happens is a tiny percentage of the pebbles end up as the new planet. Most of the pebbles are left over and still out in space. Those underutilized pebbles will continure to rain down on the cooled off planet. Their chemicals will survive.

 

[rod]

What happens is a tiny percentage of the pebbles end up as the new planet. Most of the pebbles are left over and still out in space. Those underutilized pebbles will continure to rain down on the cooled off planet. Their chemicals will survive.

So when these pebbles survive all the catastrophism and bombardment, this must breakdown various molecules so those same chemicals derived from pebbles in space are put back together (randomly) so life can evolve from non-living matter? The abiogenesis paradigm looks like that now to me.

 

[billslugg]

Yes, that is correct. A bunch of random chemicals made life with no prompting from anyone. This may not have happened on the Earth. It may have been seeded with life from somewhere else, but at some point in the past, it had to have originated chemically.
Abiogenesis is a big stretch. For that, you need lots of precursors, lots of water, heat, moisture, and high energy radiation to kick things off. Natural radioactivity is possible but not always reliable. What is reliable is UV in outer space, near a star. Precursors are made in abundance there, then sent down to cloudy Earth where enough gather to seed life. I don't remember, I was just a little baby back then, but this is what I've been told by the elders.

 

[BenH]

Type-o comment, and a reminder: The "spell-checker" is not likely to stop valid words from being mixed up. The author may have wanted the word "planets" rather than the word "plants" which easily slipped through [ section "Replicating the solar system's . .", 2nd paragraph, phrase "within the disk that plants form", which undoubtedly was meant to read "within the disk that planets form" ]. Maybe people should do the proofreading?

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Yes, I saw that. Proof reading seems to be a lost art.

I wonder what "AI" will "learn" as it ingests typos like that in the current Internet banter. Maybe "Plants grow in dust traps" or maybe "Plants circle stars in dust traps."

When "AI" learns critical thinking, then I will call it "intelligence". For now, it seems to be automated silliness.

So, I don't think we can trust it to proof read, yet.

 

[BenH]

Yes, that is correct. A bunch of random chemicals made life with no prompting from anyone. This may not have happened on the Earth. It may have been seeded with life from somewhere else, but at some point in the past, it had to have originated chemically.
Abiogenesis is a big stretch. For that, you need lots of precursors, lots of water, heat, moisture, and high energy radiation to kick things off. Natural radioactivity is possible but not always reliable. What is reliable is UV in outer space, near a star. Precursors are made in abundance there, then sent down to cloudy Earth where enough gather to seed life. I don't remember, I was just a little baby back then, but this is what I've been told by the elders.

I have leaned a long time towards accepting the above (re)stated reasoning. However there is 1) the not so minor (seeminly-) glossed-over "next step" issue, besides 2) the 'all chemical reactions are local' issue.
1) Those rare chemicals that are formed would need to remain available (or be possible to be replicated locally) for a substantial amount of time to ensure 'successful', continued development. A one-off 'reaction' might make for a start, yet would imply immediate shutdown of whatever 'progress' was made.
2) Even if whatever reaction resulted in potentially useful outcome product, it would only make for a next step if it were produced likewise in 'gazillions' of locations. This is in a way covered by "you need lots of precursors", yet such phrasing seems a colossal understatement when the discussion concerns micro-scale, chance, rare-molecule meets rare-molecule events physically happening on a global-size stage.

 

[billslugg]

There are a lot of molecules in the ocean. If you take a glass of ocean water, label each molecule, toss it back in, wait until well mixed, dip another glass out and count the labelled molecules you will find about a thousand of them. Yes, the chances are small but then the population is big.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

I think BenH makes a good point about concentrations needed.

Yes, there are a lot of molecules in a cup of ocean water, but nearly all of them are just H2O. Getting the right molecules together in one place, having them react, then getting the reactants together to have the reaction of the next step toward "life", etc., through what seems like a significantly long series of steps, seems pretty unlikely unless there are a lot of reactants in close proximity - and maybe in many places.

Could that be accomplished by only one meteorite falling into a fortuitously advantageous spot on the fledgling Earth? Or, does it require a more ubiquitous distribution of a lot of those chemicals such that they get to those advantageous-to-life-development locations in substantial concentrations?

This seems to get back to questions about when did the oceans form and when did bombardments by asteroids occur and when did geothermal vents occur in the ocean.

Or, do we really need bombardment by substantially sized asteroids? What if these precursor molecules just come into the atmosphere as grains of dust and settle into the ocean after it has formed? Maybe the concentrations of those molecules in the space surrounding Earth's orbit was quite high in residual dust some 4 billion years ago.