Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: March 10, 2013

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REAL LIFE NEWS: WE CAME FROM THE STARS

by Hazed

How did life on Earth start? Leaving aside religious explanations, it’s pretty much accepted by scientists that a primordial soup of chemicals was hit by lightning which kick-started the formation of proteins. Millions of years later, we end up with you and me.

But there has always been speculation about the origin of those chemicals, the building blocks for life, and now thanks to a recent NASA mission it looks like some of them may have come from space, hitching a ride on a comet.

The Stardust mission in 2009 rendezvoused with a comet called Wild-2 and brought back a sample of an amino acid which it had picked up from the gasses given off by the comet. Tests on this substance showed it contained too much carbon-13 to have come from Earth.

Scientists then tested the idea that simple amino acids from comets could have kick-started life on Earth. They built a snowball made up of carbon dioxide, ammonia, and various hydrocarbons - a sort of pseudo-comet - and chilled it to 10 degrees above absolute zero.

Then they zapped it with high-energy electrons to simulate the cosmic rays the comet would have encountered if it travelled through space. Analysing the results, the lab-built comet was found to have nine different amino acids and at least two linked pairs of amino acids called dipeptides. These are capable of forming proteins, enzymes and sugars - those building blocks for life.

While this isn’t absolute proof that the stuff we came from did get here on board a comet, it leads us closer to certainty.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/06/comets_seed_life_experiment/

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