The surprising new idea behind what triggered life on earth

The first molecules needed for life on Earth could have been created, what small flickers of “microlighing” between drops of water triggered the necessary chemical reactions.

“This is a new way of thinking about how the building blocks of life were shaped,” says Richard Zare at Stanford University in California.

There has been an engaging gap in our knowledge of the origin of life, specifically, how simple gases reacted to create organic molecules with carbon and nitrogen tied together, such as proteins and enzymes, what life we ​​know it.

“If you look at the gases that people thought we have on early soil, they do not contain carbon nitrogen bonds,” says Zare. “They are gases like methane, water, ammonia and nitrogen.”

Experiment of Stanley Miller and Harold Urey in 1952 revealed that electricity could turn and such gases to the necessary organic molecules, but their hypothesis was that electrical energy came from lightning.

Still, the low chance that lightning will hit a high concentration of gas in the diluted extensions of oceans or the atmosphere that many people have never been convinced that it was beaten the emergence of life on earth for approx. 4 billion years ago.

Now Zare and his colleagues have sprayed drops of water in a mixture of methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia and nitrogen gas and have shown that it can result in the formation of organic molecules with carbon nitrogen bonds, without any external source of electricity needed.

It works that the drops in the water sprayer produce small electrical charges, says Zare. “The smaller drops are negatively charged, the bigger ones are positively charged,” he says. This is down to something calls the Lenard effect, where water drops, such as those in the waterfall, collide and break up, generate an electric charge.

What the team discovered with the help of high -speed cameras, however, was that when the opposite strained drops come close enough, small flashes of electricity jump between those that Zare calls microlighting.

It is much like the way static electricity is generated, or lightning is built and discharged into clouds. “When the water drops come within nanometer of each other, you get an electric field and this electric field causes the collapse,” he says.

The flashes from microlighing, which were carried enough energy-about 12 electron volts to cause gas molecules to lose an electron and respond with each other, generating organic molecules with carbon nitrogen bonds, including hydrogenencyide, amino acid glycine and uracil of RNA.

“It is surprising to me that microlighing can initiate chemistry that starts with nitrogen. However, the reported observations are Comelling, ”says Veronica Vaida at the University of Colorado Boulder. “It brings a new and not yet reported role in water in the origin of life.”

The work means that small sparks made by breaking down waves or waterfalls would have been enough to give the railway down to life to start on this planet, Zare says.

Water spray is ubiquitous and often lands on rocks, which would allow organic chemicals to gather in their columns, he says. The area would then dry out and get moist again. Such wet -dry cycles are known to get shorter molecules to combine, gold polymerization, in along them.

“The study suggests that microlighing cube would have been plentiful in the early soil, and may have driven prebiotic chemistry, especially where other energy sources, such as lightning or UV radio, were scarce,” says Kumar Vanka at the National Chemin Laboratory in Pune, India.

Vaida believes that work also has consequences for the search for extraterrestrial life, which is often a guide by looking for the presence of water on other planets or moons. We may need to look for places that allow small drops of water to collide, she says.