We are literally made of star dust. The vast processes that create stars in the cosmos are the source of every atom and element in our body. We can be certain of this. But there are still a lot of different perspectives about how life came to be on Earth. While some scientists believe that life began on Earth, others believe that it was ‘delivered’ to the planet by asteroids and comets.
An intriguing claim that DNA, the essential building blocks of life, originated in space has now been made by a study. The research was released in the magazine Nature Communications. The substances that make up DNA, known as nucleobases, have been discovered by researchers in meteorites.
Three meteorites’ samples were studied by the researchers. In 1950, one of them crashed to Earth. It happened close to the American town of Murray in Kentucky. The second meteorite they looked at landed in Australia’s Victoria State in 1969 close to Murchison. The third one occurred in the Canadian province of British Columbia in 2000.
‘There is still much to learn about the chemical steps that led to the origin of life on Earth — the first self-replicating system. This research certainly adds to the list of chemical compounds that would have been present in the early Earth’s prebiotic (existing before the emergence of life) soup,’ Danny Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight and co-author of the study told Reuters.
The findings in this study have reinforced the argument that life’s building blocks are extra-terrestrial in origin.
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