Comets may have brought life to Earth: scientists
Comet C/2006 P1 McNaught is pictured at twilight over Sydney Harbor in Sydney, Australia, in 2007. The blurred black trails at left and right are silhouettes of bats as they flew across the sky in this slow shutter speed exposure.
A team of California scientists announced today that comets may have brought the "seedlings of life" to Earth when they hit the planet billions of years ago, said The Independent.
By reconstructing what is believed to have been inside the comets when they hit Earth travelling at some 25,000 miles per hour, the Earth Times said it looks like key ingredients for life survived the collision.
The comets' crash landing on Earth, meanwhile, may explain the sudden appearance of life on the planet some 3.8 billion years ago, according to the Independent.
Dr. Jennifer Blank, leader of the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute team, which worked with the NASA/Ames Research Center at California's Moffett Field, told the American Chemical Society today that comets, would be "ideal packages" for delivering life, said the Telegraph.
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Comets are often popularly called "dirty snowballs," a nickname that can cause confusion due to the recent discovery of liquid water in some of the little-understood celestial bodies.
The fast-flying balls of gas and dust are believed to have hit Earth when the planet was too hot for survival, a period known as the "late heavy bombardment" due to a blitz of comets and rocky asteroid collisions, said the Independent.
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Blank's team used "gas guns" to shoot high-speed, high-pressure gas at reconstructed comets holding amino acids, water and other materials, explained the Telegraph.
They found that amino acids — which form proteins necessary for life in everything from microorganisms to humans — made it through unscathed.
Meanwhile, the shock of impact may have generated the energy that bonded amino acids together, creating the protein necessary for life, said the Independent.
"We like the comet delivery scenario because it includes all of the ingredients for life – amino acids, water and energy," the Independent said Blank told the scientists.
The work presented today is part of a broader project aimed at identifying the ingredients for the life on Earth, according to Asian News International.