Scientists discover a little astronaut within all of us

Phosphorus, a key ingredient in all living things, travelled to Earth via meteors, a new study has found.

|
Nasha gazeta/www.ng.kz/AP
A meteor streaks across the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February 2013. Scientists believe that phosphorus – a key ingredient for living things – traveled to Earth via space rocks.

For those of us nursing dreams of space travel, some good news: an otherworldly substance in our bodies has toured the universe on our behalf, zipping billions of miles through space before settling on Earth.

Scientists found that the meteors pummeling our planet in its first two eons carried an unexpected gift: phosphorus, a key ingredient in the formation of all known life.

In an examination of samples from Australia, Zimbabwe, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Florida, scientists from the University of Florida and the University of Washington found phosphite only in the oldest samples, in materials from the early Archean period – about 3.5 billion years ago – in Australia.

The new research, published in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, brings a potential close to a chapter in the mystery of life on Earth: how Earth's earliest life forms, which evolved from RNA alone before the modern DNA-RNA protein developed, synthesized phosphorous.

In its modern form, phosphorous is insoluble and unreactive – a poor building material. But the latest research suggests that the phosphorous that arrived on ancient Earth via space rocks was a reactive form.

This space version, an iron–nickel phosphide mineral called schreibersite, is soluble and would have become reactive when dissolved in water. It also would have seeped through Earth's nascent oceans, becoming abundant enough to give Earth a decent go at producing life. Scientists have so far not found any homegrown sources that would have been plentiful enough to do so.

“The importance of this finding is that it provides the missing ingredient in the origin-of-life recipe: a form of phosphorus that can be readily incorporated into essential biological molecules like nucleic acids and cell-membrane lipids,” said Roger Buick, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences, in a press release.

The new finding is also bad news for those hoping to witness a replay of the beginnings of life on Earth.  Because the conditions in which life developed here billions of years ago no longer exist, the chances that new life forms will again spring from inorganic compounds is nil, at least outside of a laboratory. 

“Phosphorus chemistry on the early Earth was substantially different billions of years ago than it is today,” said Matthew Pasek, the lead author on the article and an assistant professor of geology at the University of South Florida, in a press release.

Too bad, for anyone anticipating the next round of dinosaurs.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Scientists discover a little astronaut within all of us
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/0605/Scientists-discover-a-little-astronaut-within-all-of-us
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe