Kent scientists have helped discover a ‘cosmic factory’ for producing the building blocks of life, amino acids, in research published in the journal Nature Geoscience. The ‘Great Comet’ of 1996, Hyakutake. Image Credit: NASA The team from the University of Kent, Imperial College London, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have discovered that when icy [continue reading]
It’s among the most ancient of questions: What are the origins of life on Earth? A new experiment simulating conditions in deep space reveals that the complex building blocks of life could have been created on icy interplanetary dust and then carried to Earth, jump-starting life. An image of Halley’s Comet taken in [continue reading]
Using new technology at the telescope and in laboratories, researchers have discovered an important pair of prebiotic molecules in interstellar space. The discoveries indicate that some basic chemicals that are key steps on the way to life may have formed on dusty ice grains floating between the stars. The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank [continue reading]
The hunt for the organic molecules that create proteins and enzymes critical for life here on Earth has largely happened in sophisticated terrestrial laboratories equipped with high-tech gadgetry needed to tease out their presence in space rocks and other extraterrestrial samples. This is an example of chirality of amino acids, using hands to illustrate [continue reading]
Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., are creating concoctions of organics, or carbon-bearing molecules, on ice in the lab, then zapping them with lasers. Their goal: to better understand how life arose on Earth. An artist’s concept of a very young solar system, with its swirling planet-forming disk. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle In [continue reading]
The Japanese space agency JAXA plans to land a spacecraft onto an asteroid in 2018 to search for clues of how life began on Earth. An artists rendering of Hayabusa 2 approaching the asteroid 1999 JU3. Image Credit: JAXA Hayabusa 2 will be JAXA’s second attempt at collecting material from an asteroid, after its first [continue reading]