Astrobiology, the discipline that studies the possibility of life anywhere in the universe, looks at comets with a magnifying glass; in fact, one of the theories about the appearance of biology on Earth is that it arrived on the back of one of these celestial bodies . A new study published in the journal Science reinforces their candidacy as centers of cosmic life.
The experiment consisted of mixing the chemical elements that form the characteristic ice of comets and exposing them to ultraviolet radiation . Simple as that. That meant recreating the conditions in which matter accumulates by the effects of gravity around a young star, like our Sun in the early Solar System. After examining that little “laboratory comet”, the experts discovered significant traces of ribose or pentose, a type of simple sugar essential to form the RNA and DNA of living things .
It is the first time that this compound has been detected, although, as the researchers admit, it may have formed in previous trials and went unnoticed. The difference is that a sophisticated technique called multidimensional gas chromatography has now been employed.
Apart from ribose, in the frozen matter (subjected to a temperature of -195º C in a vacuum chamber) other organic elements arose: aldehydes, acids and amino acids. All, in addition, soluble in water, like the one that covered the Earth 4,000 million years ago.
Some of these ingredients had already been detected by the Rosetta probe Philae when it landed on Comet 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko in late 2014, but the all-important sugar was conspicuous by its absence. Now it has been shown that it can be surprisingly abundant in the universe .
