THE idea that our planet’s earliest life forms arrived from space has been
boosted by the discovery that a stream of charged particles—similar to the
“wind” that continually blows from the Sun—may cause reactions that could
lead to life. In lab tests the particle stream transformed simple chemicals into
complex biological molecules.
Some researchers think the building blocks of life were brought to Earth by
comets. Now Lubomir Gabla and his colleagues at the Jagiellonian University in
Cracow, Poland, have shown how they may have formed on grains of space dust.
Gabla’s team simulated space dust with a thin layer of anthracene on a…
