Have astronomers found chemical precursor to life?

Some astronomers think that the ingredients for life are formed in cold, gas-, dust- and plasma-filled interstellar clouds.

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Tia Ghose, SPACE.com

Mon, Jan 14 2013 at 10:34 AM

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Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech

LONG BEACH, Calif. — Astronomers have found tentative traces of a precursor chemical to the building blocks of life near a star-forming region about 1,000 light-years from Earth.

The signal from the molecule, hydroxylamine, which is made up of atoms of nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen, still needs to be verified. But, if confirmed, it would mean scientists had found a chemical that could potentially seed life on other worlds, and may have played a role in life's origin on our home planet about 3.6 billion years ago.

The findings were presented Jan. 9 at the 221st annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

"It's very exciting," said Stefanie Milam, an astrochemist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who was not involved in the study. If the findings can be verified, "this will be the first detection of this new molecule. It gives us a lot of hope for prebiotic chemistry in this particular region."

Some astronomers think that the ingredients for life are formed in cold, gas-, dust- and plasma-filled interstellar clouds. Comets, asteroids and meteors forming in these clouds bear such chemicals, and as they continually bombard planets, they could have deposited the chemicals on Earth or other worlds, said Anthony Remijan, an astrochemist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va., who led the research effort. [7 Theories on the Origin of Life]

So while life may have emerged from hydrothermal vents on Earth — a theory that many scientists support — the molecules that eventually transformed into the earliest life forms had to come from somewhere, and that "somewhere" may have been space.

To test this theory, astronomers look for the chemical fingerprints of simple, inorganic compounds forming in interstellar clouds. These compounds aren't life or even carbon-based, but they can react with other molecules to form some of the building blocks of life, such as amino acids or the nucleotides that make up DNA. In recent years, scientists have found several different prebiotic molecules in space, said Brett McGuire, doctoral candidate in chemistry and chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology.

In the hunt for these molecules, Remijan and colleagues scanned a star-forming region of the Milky Way called L1157-B1 using the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA).

They found a very weak signal of hydroxylamine, which makes sense since, inside L1157-B1, a violent gas jet is slamming into the interstellar medium; the shock from this gas outflow would be sufficient force to trigger these chemical reactions in the otherwise frigid depths of an interstellar cloud. The result: hydroxylamine. In turn, hydroxylamine could react with other compounds, such as acetic acid, to form amino acids that could be dumped onto other worlds during space-rock collisions.

"We have some very preliminary evidence of its detection, a very weak signal that kind of looks like a line," McGuire told LiveScience.

The signal is extremely faint and doesn't definitively confirm the presence of hydroxylamine. But the signal does seem to come from the right region, McGuire said. The findings are exciting, but they are not yet a definitive chemical signature of hydroxylamine, Milam told LiveScience. "Every molecule has a fingerprint, and basically what he's presented is the thumb print. So we need all the other fingers to confirm that this is the actual molecule."

To confirm the finding, Remijan's team will keep probing the star-forming region for more signals that could confirm what they're seeing isn't coming from some other chemicals, Milam said.

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Comment: 1

Lionel Mar 06 2013 at 6:51 AM

I don't know, it seems to be that we could do more to sustain atcaul life we know about here on Earth, since we get so excited about the possibility of alien conditions making life marginally more possible than thought wherever else.How many animal species stand on the verge of needless extinction because of loss of habitat brought about by human over-expansion?I care a lot more about lions and elephants than I do about the possibility of coming across some unimaginable and likely highly hostile/

.... More

toxic extraterrestrial life form.It seems to me that everyone gets all worked up about the idea of alien contact because they think the aliens will1. Be more advanced/ superior to humans, and2. Have all kinds of wonderful technology that3. They are eager to share (for reasons that are wholly mysterious to me)When seems more likely: if alien life exists at all (within meaningful proximity), it will1. Contain within it microbes against which we have no defense (resulting in mass human death on exposure ), and/or2. View humans as a threat/target for exploitation, once aware of our existenceIf you ever did make contact you'd probably just disturb a mass of creatures who hate you and decide they want you dead.I suppose they might keep copies of some of your machines around, which would be good enough for most of the singulatarians

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