Origins of Life Found in Smashing Ice

Comets and other icy celestial bodies have some basic building blocks for life, but it takes violent impacts to take them to the next level, according to researchers who claim to have successfully created amino acids in the lab by recreating icy interplanetary collisions.

First the researchers created mixtures of water ice and light organic chemicals roughly based on what has been observed on comets and what is suspected to exist on the Saturn’s moons. Then they shocked the ice by firing at it with a steel projectile at very high, interplanetary planetary collision speeds approaching 16,000 miles per hour (7 kilometers per second).

They found that the hypervelocity impact shock of a typical comet ice mixture produced several amino acids, including equal amounts of D- and L-alanine (that means right and left-handed versions of that amino acid molecules). Meanwhile, analyses of the non-shocked “control” samples of the same ice contained none of these important steps towards genuine proteins needed for life. The results suggest that icy impacts within our solar system may play an important role for making ingredients for life.

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