Apr 19, 2011 10:03 GMT  ·  By
A rain of space rocks may have brought hydrogen, phosphorus and carbon here, billions of years ago
   A rain of space rocks may have brought hydrogen, phosphorus and carbon here, billions of years ago

Geological studies of the planet's rocks seem to point at the idea that vital chemical elements life uses today were not indigenous to Earth, but were rather brought here by extraterrestrial raining seasons.

Hydrogen, carbon and phosphorous are all elements without which life on this planet would be impossible. Yet, experts say that the chemical supplies with which Earth formed were lost during its earliest days, when everything was a ball of lava.

According to experts in geology, the three elements were lost as the planet slowly began to solidify, after forming some 4.5 billion years ago. It was only after the surface appeared that the aforementioned rain began to swoop down from the skies.

It replenished the rocks with more-than-enough supplies of the three chemicals, and traces of that can apparently still be seen today, scientists say. They explain that the mineral wealth in Earth's rocks did not originate here, but was rather delivered over millions of years from space.

If we combine this theory with the idea of panspermia – that the earliest lifeforms or basic ingredients for life were brought to Earth by meteorites and comets – you get a picture in which the entire role Earth played was resumed to being in the right orbit around the Sun.

“The extreme temperature at which the Earth's core formed more than four billion years ago would have completely stripped any precious metals from the rocky crust and deposited them in the core,” explains scientist James Brenan.

“So, the next question is why are there detectable, even mineable, concentrations of precious metals such as platinum and rhodium in the rock portion of the Earth today?” adds the expert, a professor at the University of Toronto Department of Geology and the coauthor of a study detailing the findings.

“Our results indicate that they could not have ended up there by any known internal process, and instead must have been added back, likely by a 'rain' of extraterrestrial debris, such as comets and meteorites,” says Brenan.

Details of the work he and colleagues at the University of Maryland, in the US, conducted were published in the October 18, 2010 issue of the top journal Nature Geoscience, Daily Galaxy reports.

During the research, experts subjected a mix of cold rocks and iron metal to temperatures exceeding 2,000 degrees Celsius. This is the conditions that studies determined existed on Earth after the planet solidified, but before it was subjected to meteorite/comet bombardments.

The high temperature separated the rocks and the metals, and experts determined that conditions at that time were just right to allow for the insertion of chemicals brought here on celestial objects.