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The building blocks of life can form even before there are stars or planets, a team of researchers found in a study.
The new research looked at “dark chemistry” – the ways in which new types of materials can form without energetic radiation.
They were able to simulate the conditions that govern chemistry in space, before the stars and planets that surround us today were formed, and instead there are dense interstellar clouds that will eventually form those more solid objects.
Scientists have found that even within those clouds, glycine, the simplest amino acid and a building block of life, can form. Other amino acids likely can also form under those conditions, the scientists said.
The results are reported in a new paper, published in Nature Astronomy.
In the new study, the researchers showed that it would be possible for glycine to form on the surface of frozen dust grains, without energy. Previously, studies had suggested that ultraviolet radiation would be needed to produce the molecule, but scientists have found that this could happen through “dark chemistry”.
“Dark chemistry refers to chemistry without the need for energy radiation,” said Sergio Ioppolo, of Queen Mary University in London and lead author of the paper.
“In the laboratory we were able to simulate the conditions in dark interstellar clouds where cold dust particles are covered by thin layers of ice and then processed by atoms that cause the fragmentation of precursor species and the recombination of reactive intermediates.”
The researchers say the discovery could suggest that those molecules – which could continue to form life as we see it on Earth – could be spread more widely across the universe than we thought. If this is true, it could be a “precursor to other complex organic molecules,” they say, forming them and then including them in objects like comets, which could carry them to Earth and other planets.
“The important conclusion of this work is that the molecules that are considered building blocks of life are already formed at a stage that is well before the formation of stars and planets begins,” said Harold Linnartz, Director of the Laboratory of Astrophysics. at the Leiden Observatory.
“Such an early formation of glycine in the evolution of star-forming regions implies that this amino acid can be formed more ubiquitously in space and is conserved in most of the ice prior to inclusion in the comets and planetesimals that make up the material from which the finally the planets are made. “
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