Violent young Sun may have seeded life on Earth: study
May 23, 2016
Life on Earth may have sprung from bombardment by a youthful Sun lashing out with flares as potent as a thousand trillion exploding atomic bombs, a study suggested on Monday.
Such violence may explain how Earth became hospitable to life about four billion years ago, when the planet, and its star, were much, much colder, a research team wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience.
While the Sun was about a third fainter than it is today, it was likely much more tempestuous, they found.
Repeated super-flares would have smashed nitrogen (N2) molecules in the atmosphere to yield a planet-warming greenhouse gas called nitrous oxide (N2O or "laughing gas"), as well as hydrogen cyanide, which produces amino acids—the building blocks of proteins.
While it is essential for all life, nitrogen in the form it would have existed in a young Earth's atmosphere is not chemically reactive, and needs to be transformed into more accessible forms.
Very high temperatures can achieve this.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-05-violent-young-sun-seeded-life.html#jCp
May 23, 2016
Life on Earth may have sprung from bombardment by a youthful Sun lashing out with flares as potent as a thousand trillion exploding atomic bombs, a study suggested on Monday.
Such violence may explain how Earth became hospitable to life about four billion years ago, when the planet, and its star, were much, much colder, a research team wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience.
While the Sun was about a third fainter than it is today, it was likely much more tempestuous, they found.
Repeated super-flares would have smashed nitrogen (N2) molecules in the atmosphere to yield a planet-warming greenhouse gas called nitrous oxide (N2O or "laughing gas"), as well as hydrogen cyanide, which produces amino acids—the building blocks of proteins.
While it is essential for all life, nitrogen in the form it would have existed in a young Earth's atmosphere is not chemically reactive, and needs to be transformed into more accessible forms.
Very high temperatures can achieve this.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-05-violent-young-sun-seeded-life.html#jCp