NASA scientists study origin of life after simulating cosmic evolution

tech.hindustantimes.com:

NASA scientists have performed a new experiment that enables them to study the evolution of life. At the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, scientists wanted to explore how amino acids and amines may have formed by simulating a mini cosmic evolution under lab conditions. The scientists made ices that simulate those found in interstellar clouds and then blasted them with radiation. The leftover material was then exposed to water and heat to replicate the conditions they would have experienced inside asteroids.

Danna Qasim, a research scientist, along with her colleagues made ices out of molecules that space telescopes commonly find in interstellar cloud. The ice consists of water, methanol, CO2, and Ammonia. A Van de Graaff particle accelerator was used to zap the ices with high-energy protons to mimic the cosmic radiation the ices would have experienced in a molecular cloud. The radiation process broke apart simple molecules. Those molecules then recombined into complex amines and amino acids, such as ethylamine and glycine. The amino acids were then left in gooey residues.

“The important take-away is that the building blocks of life have a strong link not only to processes in the asteroid, but also to those of the parent interstellar cloud,” said Danna Qasim, Qasim now is a research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and lead author of a study published on January 9 in the journal ACS Earth and Space Chemistry.

“We expect that these residues from the interstellar cloud are transferred to the protoplanetary disk that creates a solar system, including asteroids," Qasim added.

Next came the asteroid simulations from billions of years ago, called “aqueous alteration.” Later, they