The sudden new idea behind what sparked life on Earth

The first molecules needed for life on Earth could have been created when small microlighting was lit between water drops of the necessary chemical reactions.

“This is a new way to think about how to form life building blocks,” he says. Richard Zari At Stanford University, California.

There was a permanent hole in our knowledge of the origin of life, specifically how the simple gases reaction was to create organic particles with carbon and nitrogen associated together, such as proteins and enzymes, which life depends on as we know.

“If you look at the gases that people believed to have been on early Earth, they do not contain nitrogen bonds of carbon,” says Zeer. “They are gases like methane, water, ammonia and nitrogen.”

Experiments before Stanley Miller and Harold Uri In 1952, it revealed that electricity could convert water and that these gases into the necessary organic molecules, but their hypothesis was that the electrical energy came from lightning.

However, the low opportunity for lightning strikes a large concentration of gases in the reduced spaces of the oceans or that the atmosphere means that many people have never been convinced that it was behind the appearance of life on Earth about 4 billion years ago.

Now, he and his colleagues have sprayed drops of water in a mixture of methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia and nitrogen gas-and showed that it could lead to the formation of organic molecules with carbon nitrogen bonds, with no external electricity.

It works because the drops in the water spray produce small electrical charges, says ZARE. “The smaller drops are shipped negatively, and the largest drops are positively charged,” he says. This is due to something called Lenard, where water drops collide, such as those in a waterfall, collision and disintegration, which generates electrical charge.

What the team discovered using high -speed cameras, though, is that when the charged drops approach adequately close, small flashes of the electric jump between them, which ZARE Microlighting calls.

It is very similar to the way fixed electricity is created, or lightning is built and discharged in clouds. “When water drops come inside the nanopolitan standards for each other, you get an electric field and this electric field leads to collapse,” he says.

Sufficient light flashes carried enough energy-about 12 electronte-to make gas molecules lose electron and interact with each other, generating organic molecules with nitrogen carbon bonds, including hydrogen cyanide, amino acids and swords, one of the components of RNA.

“It is surprising that the microbial descent can start chemistry from nitrogen. However, the notes reported are convincing.” Veronica Vida At Colorado Bulder University. “It brings a new role and has not yet been reported to water at the origin of life.”

Zeer says that the work indicates that the small sparks made by the waves or waterfalls were sufficient to provide the chemicals needed for life to start this planet.

He says that the water sprays are everywhere and often falling on the rocks, allowing organic chemicals to accumulate in their cracks. Then the area dries and becomes wet again. It is known that these wet dry sessions make the shortest molecules unite or touch, in long sessions.

“The study indicates that Microlighting could have been abundant in the environments rich in early land, and may have pushed pre -biomed chemistry, especially when other energy sources, such as lightning or UV rays, were rare.” Kumar Vanka In the National Chemical Laboratory in Pion, India.

VAIDA believes that work also has effects on the search for a life outside the earth, which often guides by searching for the presence of water on planets or other moons. She says we have to search for places that can collide with small drops of water.