Establishing the Origins of Life in the Universe

Determining when and how life first developed in the Universe is one of the key questions in science, and three European experts now propose a new method for establishing how the earliest life-enabling chemicals formed.

The team says that understanding the time onset and conditions that prevailed in the Cosmos at the time when the earliest organic molecules came along is critical to making more sense of the origins of life itself.

According to predictions made by the three cosmologists, it could be that life first developed on Earth about 9.6 billion years after the Big Bang, or 4. 1billion years ago, Daily Galaxy reports.

But the experts do not believe that these were original life forms, that developed exclusively on our planet, but rather the descendants of even more primitive life, that had appeared in the Universe long before the Sun was born.

Sapienza University of Rome physicists Nicola Poccia, Alessandro Ricci and Antonio Bianconi believe that the first signs of life appeared in the Cosmos only a few billion years after the Big Bang. The event took place some 13.75 billion years ago.

The investigators propose that life did not originate in a single location in the Universe, but rather in a large number of places, and over many eons. They add that the earliest precursors that could enable the emergence of life developed continuously between 1.5 and 9.6 billion years after the Big Bang.

This is also the time span in which dark energy is believed to have established its dominance of the Universe. Rapid star formation and a multitude of supernova blasts were all hallmarks of that age .

Therefore, it stands to reason that the emergence of life in the Universe might be connected with the synthesis of numerous chemical elements suitable for life from stellar explosions. There is unfortunately no way of knowing for certain whether this was the case or not.

For centuries, scientists have believed that life originated here on Earth, either made by a god, or in a primordial soup. But new data appear to suggest that life on Earth is just a fraction of life everywhere.

Investigations conducted recently have revealed that comets most likely brought both water and the precursors of life here, suggesting that comets may be acting as lifeboats, taking molecules that allow for the development of basic life throughout star systems.