In the 1931 film Frankenstein, Dr. Henry Frankenstein howling his triumph was an electrifying moment in more than one way. While massive rays and energy crackled, Frankenstein’s monster stirred on a laboratory table – his corpse brought to life by the power of electricity.
A Electricity may also have started life on Earth billions of years agoalthough with a little less scenery destruction than that classic movie scene.
Earth is about 4.5 billion years, and the oldest direct fossil evidence of ancient life – stromatolites, or microscopic organisms preserved in layers known as microbial rugs – is about 3.5 billion years. However, some scientists suspect that life originated even sooner, emerging from organic molecules accumulated in primitive water bodies, a mixture sometimes called primordial soup.
But where did this organic material come from first? Researchers decades ago proposed that rays caused chemical reactions in the oceans of ancient earth and spontaneously produced organic molecules.
Now, a new research, published on March 14 in the journal Science Advances, suggests that almost invisible microrelimal loans, generated between water vapor -laden droplets, could have been potent enough to cook amino acids from inorganic material.
Amino acids – organic molecules that combine to form proteins – are the most basic building blocks of life and would have been the first step towards the evolution of life.
“It is recognized that an energy catalyst was almost certainly necessary to facilitate some of the reactions in the early land that led to the origin of life,” said astrobiologist and geobiologist Amy J. Williams, associate professor at the University of Florida Department of Geosciences.
For the animacies to form, they need nitrogen atoms that can bind to carbon. Release nitrogen gas atoms requires the break of powerful molecular connections and consumes a huge amount of energy, according to Williams, which was not involved in the research.
“Lightning, or in this case, the microrellam, has the energy to break molecular bonds and therefore facilitate the generation of new molecules that are essential to the origin of life on Earth,” Williams told the CNN in an email.
Fog
To recreate a scenario that may have produced the first organic molecules on Earth, the researchers were based on 1953 experiments, when American chemicals Stanley Miller and Harold Urey invented a mixture of gases imitating the atmosphere of ancient earth.
Miller and Urey combined ammonia (NH3), methane (CH4), hydrogen (H2) and water, ended the atmosphere inside a glass sphere and shook it with electricity, producing simple amino acids containing carbon and nitrogen.
The Miller-Urey experiment, as it is known now, has supported the scientific theory of abiogenesis: that life could emerge from non-living molecules.
For the new study, scientists revisited the 1953 experiments, but directed their attention to electrical activity on a smaller scale, a senior study author Richard Zare, professor of chemistry at Stanford University, California.
Zare and his colleagues observed the exchange of electricity between charged water droplets measuring between a micron and 20 microns in diameter (the width of a human hair is one hundred microns.)
“The large droplets are positively charged. Small droplets are negatively charged,” Zare told CNN. “When droplets with opposite loads are close, the electrons can jump from the negatively charged droplet to the positively charged drip.”
The researchers mixed ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen in a glass bulb, then sprayed the gases with water, using a high -speed camera to capture weak vapor micro -detailed flashes.
When they examined the contents of the bulb, they found organic molecules with carbon-nitrogen bonds. These included amino acid glycine and uracilla, a nucleotide base in RNA.
“We didn’t discover any new chemistry; in fact, we reproduced all the chemistry that Miller and Urey did in 1953,” said Zare. The team also did not discover any new physics, he added – the experiments were based on known principles of electrostatic.
“What we did for the first time was to see that small droplets, when formed from water, actually emit light and produce this spark,” said Zare. “This is new. And this spark causes all kinds of chemical transformations.”
Water and Life
Lightning is a dramatic demonstration of electricity, but it is also sporadic and unpredictable. Even in a volatile billion billions of years ago, lightning may have been very infrequent to produce amino acids in sufficient quantities for life – a fact that has released doubts about such theories in the past, said Zare.
The water jet, however, would have been more common than lightning. A more likely scenario is that the microrellation generated by the mist constantly electrocuted amino acids in the existence of pools and puddles, where molecules could accumulate and form more complex molecules, eventually leading to the evolution of life.
“Microdescharges between obviously charged water microgoticles produce all the organic molecules previously observed in the Miller -Uy experiment,” Zare said. “We propose that this is a new mechanism for the prebiotic synthesis of molecules that constitute the blocks of life construction.”
However, even with the new discoveries about microrellations, issues remain on the origins of life, he added. While some scientists support the notion of electrically charged beginnings for the first blocks of life construction, an alternative abiogenesis hypothesis proposes that the early amino acids of the earth have been cooked around hydrothermal sources at sea bottom, produced by a combination of seawater, hydrogen -rich fluids and extreme pressure.
Another hypothesis suggests that organic molecules did not originate on earth. Instead, they graduated in space and were loaded here by comets or asteroid fragments, a process known as panspermia.
“We don’t know the answer to this question yet,” said Zare. “But I think we’re closer to understanding something more about what could have happened.”
Although the details of the origins of life on Earth can never be fully explained, “this study provides another way to the formation of crucial molecules for the origin of life,” said Williams.
“Water is an ubiquitous aspect of our world, giving rise to the nickname ‘Blue Marble’ to describe the land of space. Maybe the fall of water, the most crucial element that sustains us, has also played a larger role in the origin of life on earth than we recognize earlier.”
