The theory that comets delivered the molecular building blocks for life on Earth is a long-standing one, since comets are known to carry many of these molecules. However, a new study challenges this idea.<\/p>\n
The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, found the cometary delivery of these building blocks would be\u2014at best\u2014a \u2018one-off fluke,\u2019 and not the steady rain of prebiotic molecules that had been theorized.<\/p>\n
Using computer modeling, the researchers determined that comets travel too fast and at too sharp an angle to Earth\u2019s atmosphere for the fragile organic molecules to survive: they would almost certainly vaporize on impact with the surface. However, the researchers also found that another planet in our system\u2014Mars\u2014could be a slightly more promising candidate for cometary delivery of prebiotic molecules, although this is still highly unlikely. The results are published in the journal Scientific Reports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The theory that comets delivered the molecular building blocks for life on Earth is a long-standing one, since comets are known to carry many of these molecules. However, a new study challenges this idea. The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, found the cometary delivery of these building blocks would be\u2014at best\u2014a \u2018one-off fluke,\u2019 [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246099\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}