Cosmic dust contains all the elements needed for life but has previously been considered too rare to have acted as a ‘fertilizer’ for prebiotic chemistry. Now, using a combination of astrophysical and geological models, it is revealed that cosmic dust could have gently accumulated on the surface of early Earth in sufficient quantities to promote the chemical reactions that led to first life.
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References
Walton, C. R., Rimmer, P. & Shorttle, O. Can prebiotic systems survive in the wild? An interference chemistry approach. Front. Earth Sci. https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2022.1011717 (2022). A review article that examines the difficulty and opportunity of evaluating origin-of-life scenarios using their geological contexts.
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Pearce, B. K. D., Pudritz, R. E., Semenov, D. A. & Henning, T. K. Origin of the RNA world: the fate of nucleobases in warm little ponds. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 114, 11327–11332 (2017). An earlier modelling study that argues against the prebiotic relevance of cosmic dust but does not consider the role of sedimentary concentration processes.
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This is a summary of: Walton, C. R. et al. Cosmic dust fertilization of glacial prebiotic chemistry on early Earth. Nat. Astron. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02212-z (2024).
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Cosmic dust may have driven the geochemical origins of life on Earth. Nat Astron (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02213-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02213-y
