Did comets bring life to Earth?

by Rich Bowden - Aug 18 2009, 05:35

The question of how life on Earth originated has again been put under the spotlight as scientists claim to have discovered an important ingredient of life in comet dust.

In discovering the amino acid glycine in a sample collected from the comet Wild 2, researchers at the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Md. have speculated that comets may have delivered some of the essential building blocks that contributed towards life on Earth.

"By detecting glycine, we now know that comets could have delivered amino acids to the early Earth, contributing to the ingredients that life originated from," said Jamie Elsila, a research scientist at Goddard and coauthor of a paper outlining the discovery in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.

Elsila, from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center told Discovery News that, though the discovery was not a surprise, examination of the comet dust which fell in a Utah desert in 2006 pointed to another possibility of how life on Earth began.

"We're interested in understanding the inventory of materials that were available on early Earth when life got started," Elsila said.

"It's not a particularly unexpected discovery that glycine is in a comet -- we've found amino acids in meteorites before -- but it does show that comets are another way that amino acids could have come to Earth," she added.

Planetary biologist Max Bernstein of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, who was not involved in the research told Wired News said the uncovering of the amino acid from a comet suggested such components would be widespread throughout the universe.

“If you’re seeing amino acids in comets, then that really gives credence to the idea that the basic components of life are going to be widespread throughout the universe,” he said. “It’s one thing for me to do it in the lab and say it should be so, but it’s another thing for somebody to actually measure it.”

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