Comets may have helped seeds of life to germinate

Comets, giant snowballs of ice and dust, are known to have carried organic chemicals and water to the early Earth.

But just what caused life to spring out of nowhere on a barren and desolate planet billions of years ago remains a mystery.

Now scientists may have part of the answer. Laboratory experiments have shown that amino acids – organic molecules that are the building blocks of proteins – would have survived violent comet impacts.

What is more, the shock of a large comet impact would have provided the energy needed to start bonding amino acids together to make proteins.

Proteins provide the raw material that allows all living things, from microbes to humans, to exist and function.

Their creation by comets may explain how life appeared so quickly at the end of a period 3.8 billion years ago called the “late heavy bombardment”. During this turbulent time the Earth was showered by both comets and rocky asteroids, leaving crater scars that are still seen on the Moon.

Dr Jennifer Blank, who led the US scientists from the Nasa/Ames Research Centre in Moffett Field, California, said: “Our research shows that the building blocks of life could, indeed, have remained intact despite the tremendous shock wave and other violent conditions in a comet impact.

“Comets really would have been the ideal packages for delivering ingredients for the chemical evolution thought to have resulted in life. We like the comet delivery scenario because it includes all of the ingredients for life – amino acids, water and energy.”

Dr Blank described the experiments at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Diego, California.

Her team set out to simulate conditions that existed when Earth was repeatedly struck by amino acid-carrying comets, some of which were 10 miles or more in diameter.