THE impacts of meteorites whizzing into primordial oceans may have created amino acids, the building blocks of life.
Yoshihiro Furukawa at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, and his team knew that high-pressure impacts can create ammonia.
To test whether such impacts could form other molecules, they shot a mixture of meteorite ingredients – solid carbon, iron and nickel – at high speed into water. They later recovered organic molecules needed for life such as fatty acids, amines and an amino acid (Nature Geoscience, ).
When oceans began to form about 4.3 billion years ago, meteorites were about 1000 times as…
