A new study led by the University of Cambridge challenges the long-standing idea that comets helped kick-start life on our home planet, suggesting that the icy bodies were largely unable to deliver the concentrated chemical ingredients needed for prebiotic chemistry.
Comets didn’t seed life on Earth after all, a new study suggests, potentially overturning a century-old idea. The theory that comets delivered the molecular building blocks for life on Earth is a long-standing one, since comets are known to carry…
The appearance of life on Earth is still a mystery. It's constrained by a few factors; for instance, the Earth had to have cooled before life could get started, and there had to be some liquid water, the right chemicals,…
(October 2015)What conditions are necessary for a planet to harbor life?Water, atmosphere, crust, distance from the star—as we consider changing each of these various conditions one by one, we begin to see how delicately balanced the current Earth…
Figure 2. The Genesis Lab with Genesis Engine 1.0, a gas-filled chamber (on the left). Origin of life articles, stromatolites and field expedition at hot springs in New Zealand on the right. Credit: Bruce Damer. The Genesis Lab's research effort and its…
New simulations suggest comets couldn’t have kick-started life on their own, though they may still have played a smaller role. Comets may have brought some of the ingredients for life to Earth. The problem is that they probably destroyed them…
What could a handful of dust reveal about the birth of our solar system? Scientists studying NASA's Bennu samples have found an unexpected clue buried in material billions of years old. Asteroid Bennu has been keeping a secret for 4.5 billion…
A long-standing theory says comets brought the building blocks of life to Earth, but new research challenges this idea. The study finds that such an event would have been extremely rare, calling it a “one-in-a-million occurrence.” Scientists at the University…
Comets probably weren’t reliable couriers for the ingredients that helped life begin on Earth. A new Cambridge-led study found that fragile organic molecules would usually have been destroyed when the comets carrying them struck the surface. Published in Scientific Reports,…
Comets didn't seed life on Earth after all, a new study suggests, potentially overturning a century-old idea. The theory that comets delivered the molecular building blocks for life on Earth is a long-standing one, since comets are known to carry…
Prebiotic chemistry: how life's first molecules formed, the RNA world and experiments that recreate early-Earth chemistry.
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