Life On Earth May Have a 'Sugar and Space' Origin

Life on earth has an extraterrestrial origin, according to a new study that was concluded on Thursday. A recent experiment, conducted to understand the source of life's building blocks, suggests that the molecules arrived from outside the planet.

Until now, decades of previous experimentations failed to produce the complex molecules necessary for the existence of all organisms. Now, scientists from Institut de Chimie de Nice (ICN) have managed to produce essential molecules and ribose, a type of sugar that supported an early version of life, by blowing up a chunk of artificially created interstellar ice with ultraviolet light.

The study was a key to understand the formation of essential building blocks in an early solar system, whirling with grains of dust and ice as well as bathed in radiation. The latest findings suggest that the ice and dust particles, infused with ribose, may have amalgamated into comets, which consequently crash landed on our planet. The phenomenon enriched the primordial structure that would eventually give rise to life.

"If you think of all these little molecules we're making as Lego blocks, and life as a kind of very complex, organized Lego castle," said Dr. Scott Sandford, NASA astronomer and space scientist, "the fact that Lego blocks are falling out of the sky can't be a bad thing."

Previously, there has been no detection of ribose either in real comets or artificial lab created ones. As per researchers, our planet was originally a RNA (Ribonucleic acid) world, that long predated the origin of DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) and life on earth, including the cell.

According to scientists, the new finding is exciting because it plays a key character in the story of life's origin. It is also being suggested that these biological building blocks may have reached other planets elsewhere in space, which makes the case of finding life outside our planet stronger.