Where did the materials that helped the first life forms on Earth come from? One scientific answer that has been proposed for decades has pointed to comets, those icy bodies from the edges of the solar system that carry within them organic compounds that may have contributed to the creation of life billions of years ago.
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But a new study overturns an important aspect of this idea; the comets that scientists believed carried the building blocks of life may have been arriving on Earth at such a tremendous speed that their impact with the surface would have been enough to destroy most of their chemical cargo.
What is most interesting is that Mars, where we are searching today for traces of ancient life, may have been more fortunate than Earth in receiving these materials from comets, due to the different collision conditions between the two planets.
Comets have long been considered natural repositories of organic materials that formed in the early stages of the solar system's history. They contain ice, dust, and compounds of carbon and nitrogen, so scientists have theorized that they may have supplied the young Earth with some of the materials necessary for the emergence of life.
But a comet possessing these vehicles is one thing, and its ability to deliver them intact to Earth's surface is another.
To test this issue, the researchers re-simulated the history of comet impacts on Earth 100,000 times, taking into account their sizes, speeds, atmospheric entry angles, and the conditions that prevailed on the planet more than 4 billion years ago.
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