14 DAY TRIAL // A 3.5-billion-year-old mystery concerning how life came about on Earth is now said to have been solved by a group of researchers with the University of South Florida, the University of Washington and the Edinburgh Center for Carbon Innovation.
In an article published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, these experts make a case of how meteorites were the ones to bring life-producing phosphorus to our planet.
Life as we know it would not have been possible in the absence of this reactive chemical compound, the researchers explain.
In their study, they detail how, after being carried to Earth in the form of minerals by meteorites that bombarded our planet billions of years ago, the reactive phosphorus was released in local water sources.
Once there, it turned into a salt known as phosphite, which got incorporated into prebiotic molecules and helped jump start the formation of the first lifeforms.
“Meteorite phosphorus may have been a fuel that provided the energy and phosphorus necessary for the onset of life,” stated specialist Matthew Pasek, as cited on the official website for the University of South Florida.
“If this meteoritic phosphorus is added to simple organic compounds, it can generate phosphorus biomolecules identical to those seen in life today,” the geology professor went on to say.
In its current form, phosphorus is known to be almost insoluble and unreactive.
Professor Matthew Pasek and his fellow researchers reached this conclusion after analyzing Earth core samples collected in Australia, Zimbabwe, West Virginia, Wyoming and Avon Park, Florida.
What they focused on was pinning down traces of phosphorus in Archean limestone. Their investigations led them to the conclusion that reactive phosphorus was abundant on our planet about 3.5 billion years ago.
While it is indeed possible that other sources of phosphite have had a say in producing life on Earth, odds are that considerable amounts of it came from meteorites.