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Ingredients of Life Found Around Sun-Like Star
smooth wombat writes "NASAs Spitzer Space Telescope has detected the basic organic building blocks of life in a ring orbiting in the 'habitable zone', that area where Earth orbits the Sun and where water exists on the borderline between gas and liquid, in a nearby stellar nursery. When acetylene and hydrogen cyanide combine with water they form adenine, one of the four bases of DNA. The detection supports the widely held theory that many of the molecular building blocks of life were present in the solar system even before planets formed, thus assisting the initial formation of complex organic molecules and the start of life itself." Though it was a little shakier than this observation, we've discussed the possibility of life elsewhere in the galaxy before.
What, you mean concrete evidence of an Intelligent Designer?
Love,
Kansas Board of Education
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Definitive proof that the building blocks of life were purposefully placed here by a space alien :-)
This message printed on 100% post-consumer recycled electrons.
Ingredients for bleu cheese found in my bathroom... but that doesn't mean it is bleu cheese or that I'd want to eat it even if it were.
"Though it was a little shakier than this observation, we've discussed the possibility of life elsewhere in the galaxy before."
Oh, so you've bourght us another dupe, huh? Well, thanks, Slashdot mods, thanks! FOR NOTHING!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I'd say this would definitely incresase the probability of the drake equation resulting in a non-zero answer. Complex organic molecule formation is one of the biggies that you need for development of life.
I just thought of something while looking at the graphic -- what if RNA and DNA originally assemble in the pre-planetary cloud and hang around, falling into condensing planets and so forth?
I think the current popular theory, IIRC, is that RNA molecules somehow stack up in a tidal pool, where they are gently rocked back and forth. Some correct me please.
So how hard would it be to get DNA to link up in microgravity? Sure, there's more radiation around to blast things apart, but that might be a good thing -- you could get molecules you might not get otherwise without the blowing apart. Also, in microgravity, molecules can float around in 3 dimensions.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I find myself strangely hoping that someone gives you some insightful karma for this...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Woodstock - CSNY
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
"""
The detection supports the widely held theory that many of the molecular building blocks of life were present in the solar system even before planets formed, thus assisting the initial formation of complex organic molecules and the start of life itself.
"""
Wait, so finding organic molecules around a planet supports this how? Can we tell the age of those particles, or that stellar nursery? If we are to believe a lightning strike can create life from amino acids and things of this nature... why would this support that conclusion in particular?
Maybe I'm missing the point. Perhaps someone can explain things to me?
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
" Shouldn't it be where water exists on the borderline between gas and solid?"
No. Liquid water doesn't exist at the temp and pressure where there is a borderline between gas and solid, you get direct sublimation from solid to gas under those conditions -- unless you happen to be at exactly the triple point.
Conversion between gas and liquid would help in the formation of life precursors, since the phase changes could help concentrate compounds in acqueous solution, resulting in greater rates of reaction. I'm sure there are other reasons why acqueous phase changes would help formation of complex organic molecules.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
We're several years away from being able to do spectrographic studies of rocky planets orbiting other stars (or rocky moons), but once we reach that point, it will probably be only time until we detect free oxygen and/or other molecules that disappear rapidly in the absence of life.
Life is not the presence of particular molecules. Life is the plan by which the molecules are constructed into a living organism. Molecules without the plan by which they operate are no different than computer hardware without any software installed on it. Finding hydrogen cyanide and acetylene present around another star is more a comment on the improving ability to detect molecules at a distance than it is on the presence of the 'building blocks of life.' It would have been much more remarkable if they had NOT found those substances since they are composed of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen which we would expect to be ubiquitous in the universe, based on our present knowledge. Claiming to have found the 'building blocks of life' around another star is just hype to help pump up the budget for next years work.
Actually, even the bible tells us this is so. "Ashes to ashes... dust to dust...".
Could interpret this literally and say that we (the Sun, Earth and life on it) are made from interstellar dust initially, and that's where we end up when the solar system ends its life and turns back to ashes and dust when the sun explodes.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
I sang it in the shower this morning, does that make it my song now?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I would say dfficult to prove, not aren't even remotely provable. Labratory experiments can be and have been performed to demonstrate the possibility of certain organic molocules in the conditions believed to exist early in the life of the planet.
As far as observing this process in actions, it is only a matter of finding planets at the various stages of the process and observing the expected chemical reactions. This will be easier as our ability to make the observations improves.
In fact we are performing these observations on the past, due to the speed of light. However many light-years away the observed solar system is, that is how long ago the events we see now happened.
Carbon dating measures the ratios of various carbon isotopes (C-12 and C-14 I believe), not the age of individual carbon atoms.
To inhabitants of the T'nsha'grlsk galaxy this is hardly surprising. Scattered across their saucier-pan-shaped galaxy are planets containing the ingredients for Fetucinni Alfredo, Pork Tenderloin, Chicken Cacciatore, and in what will most likely result in a lawsuit should humans develop interstellar space travel, the McRib.
When asked about the ingredients for Life, Ss's'krpwjdnq waved his third-dimension-bound tentacles wildly and secreted an information packed protein strand. While there is no English equivalent for his communique, a rough translation would be "Given the chance to eat a human, I would."
The ingredients of Life.
Sure as hell don't have to go that far out to get it - local supermarket has it!
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
I suggest you look into two of his books, "3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated" and "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About".
He gave some lectures about how he wrote "3:16", his motivations for doing so, and various thoughts about God. These lectures were the basis for "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About"
I may twist orthodoxy to partly justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely.
Carbon dating measures the ratio of C14 to C12. C14 is radioactive and decays over time. When an organism is alive it is constantly ingesting outside sources of carbon and so the C12-C14 ratio is the same as that of the environment. The environment gets C14 when cosmic rays interact with C12 in the upper atmosphere. When the organism dies, it stops ingesting carbon, the C14 decays and the ratio changes. The change in this ratio can tell you how long ago something stopped ingesting C14 (when it died).
You are not really measuring the age of the carbon atoms, just the ratio of a certian short-lived version of Carbon.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Carbon-14 (the radioactive isotope of carbon used in carbon dating) is continuously generated on Earth at a fairly constant rate, by the interaction of neutrons (from cosmic rays) with nitrogen (and occasionally oxygen and carbon) atoms. So, 'new' carbon-14 atoms are being made all the time.
:)
Because it has a relatively constant abundance in nature, living things should also maintain the same ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 in their tissues... until they die, at which point they're no longer taking in new carbon from the environment. Then the carbon-14 starts to decay (with a half-life of ~5700 years), but the carbon-12, which is stable, remains. Measuring this ratio can give an approximation of the length of time since the creature died.
The carbon-12 in your body is stable, and could very well pre-date the solar system. Carbon-14 doesn't hang around very long, in astronomical timescales.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
The smallest human chromosome is a chain of 50 million base pairs (over an alphabet of 4: ACGT). 4^1,000,000 is roughly 10^608,000.
No one has ever suggested that a fully formed human chromosome could just pop into existance out of constituant elements. Your example is a straw man.
No explanation has yet been demonstrated of how the initial
chemical constituents formed to produce a DNA/RNA based life form.....No, a lightning strike/spark on an early 1950's high scholl science project that produces some organic slime is not the same thing.
Yes it danm well is, sunshine. That experiment proved that these elements, amino acids etc, were almost guaranteed to have existed in abundance in the early earth. These elements ARE the building blocks of life.
Take a look a a model where a soup of these elements exists, add in factors, look at the probabilites, then multiply by the collasal timescales and particle counts involved and you'll quickly realise that not only was it likely that life evolved out of slime or pools around geysters, it was practically inevitable.
Go back to Kansas and take last years flu vaccine, and go pray to whatever straw man is up there in the sky. We'll be over here in the Age of the Enlightenment if you'd care to join us.
May the Maths Be with you!
You and your entropy. Entropy only means that chaos increases if no energy is expended to order the system. Think about a messy room (your mother's basement?). It's going to be messy until someone gets fed up with the smell of rotting pizza crusts, at which point they will expend energy and order the system. The entropy of the room decreases because energy was infused into the system. Entropy always increases, but only on a universal scale because no energy can enter or leave the universe. There is no other system of which that is true.
So now, we can move on to molecular biology. The two abstract things you need for life are the ability to get energy from your environment and a way to order yourself. DNA and proteins do this. Lab experiments have shown that ammonia, water, oxygen and methane, in a closed flask, will generate amino acids if they twirl them around enough and give them some energy (your lightning strike). If these amino acids can make an energy gradient by harvesting electrons from something common on a primordial earth, like Hydrogen Sulfide, then you have energy. And if get an amino acids that can store its code on something like DNA...you have life. Now, that's a whole lot of ifs. And, taken together, a very low probability. But, like someone else mentioned, these small molecular reactions would be going on thousands of time a second with a hundreds of moles of materials over a billion years. That's a ludicrous number of chances for something to get it right. And the thing is, once it's right, there is no need for it to happen again. Once you have the system that maintains order and a source of energy, you are good to go. It's the miracle of life.
It has been a nervous year, with people beginning to feel like Christian Scientists with appendicitis.
This is really simple. Scientists made observations. They reported their results. The results were in line with predictions made by existing theory. Therefore, the theory is strengthened rather than weakened. This is the scientific method. The "wild speculation" that organic chemicals could exist around a star prior to planetary formation now has some more concrete evidence. Their observations were the test; their results are their proof. Sure their observations do not answer all the questions, but science never answers all the questions.
People have been gazing through telescopes making observations of hundreds of years before there was "practical space technology". At one point, it was "wild speculation" that the Earth was not the center of the Universe. Building theories to explain observations is how science works. Hard science is driven by educated speculation. A little bit more of "science fiction" has slipped into the realm of "science fact".
I'll point out the criteria to a successful adenine (a component of DNA) creation as I recall from various scientific sources (Intelligent Design not withstanding):
1. Gravity of at least 0.4 G is a requirement (micro-gravity need not apply here as a recent ISS scientific experiement shown with regard to catalyst of acytelene/water/hydrogen under electric sparks/shocks)
2. Swirling motions (tidal pool is nature's best liquid/air agitators)
3. Minimal radiation (asinine will not remain cohesive for long under gamma bombardments)
This means a heavy shielding must be in place, which means dense air and/or planet
4. Lightning... the very most improbable of all aspect of the building block starter. It's gotta strike at the right place and the right time, preferably near the tidal pool.
I'd gotta hand it to mother nature and God, we are one lucky fools on this unqiue planet, Earth.
Not particularly directed at the parent post..
I think what some of the posters here fail to understand is the entire thing with :
infinite time
infinite space
infinite possibilities
given those variables, I think it is entirely possible that we might be more "normal" than one would think considering we are made up of the this stuff and the fact that these things have a tendency to fall into place in certain ways naturally.
I actually think it is an thought-cop-out to just declare a "designer" did something instead of coming to grips with the idea of trillions and trillions of stars and infinity.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
My! What DO they teach you young Scientologists these days?
Where to send the checks?
You seem like someone who is out of their depth using words like "protien" (sic) and "donded" (sic). Maybe you should come back and post again when you've learned something about the subject.
Or our detection methods simply slant the results to systems like that.
Our detection methods slant towards larger planets, definitely. But the fact that most of those large planets are in highly eccentric orbits or close to their stars has nothing to do with the detection method. It appears to be the predominate result of solar system formation. Ours appears to be the exception, not the rule.
Our detection methods could find Jupiter like planets in Jupiter like orbits, and they do. They're just few and far between.
Your post implies the simplest viable life form is DNA based with highly specialized structures like ribosomes when, in fact, they are not required to form from the primordial soup.
Life can start simple. A single molecule that reacts with other molecules around it and makes imperfect copies of itself is enough. Given time, all suitable molecules will be used and live, even if primitive, will be everywhere.
Since the copies are not perfect, mutation does happen and you will have a lot of different "copiers" in your soup, some better that the others, some building more complex structures that can, in turn, copy themselves.
I agree with you. Expecting cell based lifeforms in the first week of a biosphere is ludicrous, but you are wrong. Cells, nuclei and DNA are only one way of life to express itself. It happens to be the way we know because once a certain kind of life dominates, there is little space left for other forms. It happened here.
There are sure other forms of organization that happened all over the place. Remember: billions of places over billions of years make a lot of attemps on life.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Complex really means something like DNA or a protein, with tens of thousands of atoms in it, not a molecule as simple as a single nucleotide or one amino acid, with a dozen or so.
It isn't really the step from the simplest of molecules, like water, to slightly more complex molecules, like amino acids, which is the problem. Experiments starting with Stanley Miller's have shown this is an easy step.
Very likely the tricky step is forming an enclosed system in which information is passed back and forth from some information-storage molecule like DNA to some actuator molecules, like proteins. Not only have we never seen such a system, outside of life and deliberately-constructed life analogues, but we have no idea how it could even come about.
It's hard to even imagine a plausible evolutionary sequence that leads from random organic molecules to this kind of system. The problem is that the benefits of being "alive", in particular being able to reproduce yourself are clear, but it's hard to see any benefits to being "halfway alive", e.g. to having half of the necessary molecules for reproducing yourself. That makes it hard to imagine any intermediate steps between non-life and life that would be favored by natural selection. And if there aren't any good intermediate stages, then life has to originate all at once, zap, in some wildly unlikely coming together of an entire living system. This is almost equally hard to swallow (unless you want to invoke the hand of God).
A good analogy is with wings: how do wings evolve? The problem is that on first glance it doesn't seem useful to have only one wing, or wings too short to lift your mass. So how could a wingless creature evolve by small stages towards having wings? It would seem that wings would have to originate all at once, zap, in some wildly-unlikely set of mutations that would give a species wings in one generation.
However, I believe the current belief is that wings started off as cooling fins, or possibly steering vanes for animals that leaped through the air. In which case, of course small fins or vanes are useful, and one can see the intermediate stages that would allow full wings to evolve gradually. What's needed in evolutionary biology is some similar insight into how certain groupings of molecules well short of what we'd call a living system could, nevertheless, have an evolutionary advantage.
What's also needed is some idea of why we don't see this kind of process going on all the time on Earth. Why don't we see things halfway to living all the time in the muds and stagnant ponds of the Earth? One possible answer is that the best conditions for the evolution of life (e.g. no free oxygen) are no longer present.
I don't totally agree. Definitely, the extrasolar planets found by the radial velocity planet searches are largely close to their stars, but that's another observational bias. Not only do closer-in planets tug on their stars more (v ~ 1/r^1/2), but it takes longer for a large-separation planet to complete an orbit, and radial velocity teams don't report a planet until they've seen one orbit. Which means the time baseline of the surveys becomes important. The longest target stars have been monitered is 15 years or so. This is, not coincidentally, the orbital period of the largest-separation extrasolar planet known to date, 55 Cnc d (14.7 years, 6 AU). Also, the star 55 Cnc was being carefully monitered all this time in large part because it was known to already harbor a planet (55 Cnc b, has just a 15 day period, and was one of the first half-dozen extrasolar planets discovered).
My point is that while the results of the radial velocity surveys are pretty complete within 3 or 4 AU or so, beyond this the results are heavily driven by observational bias. Not only do you need 15 years of data to close an orbit, you need enough data points to see a much fainter radial velocity signature. For comparison, the next furthest-out extrasolar planet is at 4.5 AU, and of the 136 extrasolar planets found by the radial velocity method, only 5 are beyond 4 AU (see the California and Carnegie planet almanac for details).
Jupiter is in an orbit of 5.2 AU, taking 12 years to go around the sun. So I would submit we've found no planets of Jupiter-like mass at Jupiter-like orbits (closest would be 55 Cnc d, 6 AU, but--at least--4 times the mass of Jupier, or HD 50499, 1.84 Jupiter masses at 4.4 AU). And I'd say further that current observational techniques would really need to stretch to hit such a planet, so I don't think we're not finding them because they aren't there. (Plus, it's widely suspected that radial velocity teams know about a lot of these long-period planets, but are waiting to announce them until the orbits have been confirmed. All the rest of us can do is wait and see).
As to the basic question of this thread, whether you can get other stellar systems similar to our solar system (namely, a rocky planet in a stable orbit in the habitable zone), I think that issue is nowhere near solved. Recent papers have shown that of nearby, sun-like stars, about 10-20% have a planet that can be detected with the radial velocity method (the exact percentage depends on the metallicty of the star). What that means is that we know between a tenth and a fifth of stars have a planet more massive than Jupiter within the inner 3 or 4 AU. That says absolutely nothing about the other 80-90% of stars. What fraction of these have a Jupiter-like planet in a Jupiter-like orbit is very much up for grabs. We know that it's unlikely for an earth to form in most of the planetary systems we've been seeing (migrating giant planets, or planets in eccentric orbits, would almost certainly disrupt the earth-wannabe). But again, that's only 10 or 20% of stars. So, it could very well be that 80-90% of stars have a rocky planet in the habitable zone. We don't know how common our solar system is yet, and it'll likely take future missions (Kepler, TPF, next-generation adaptive optics systems on ground based telescopes) to really find out.