14 DAY TRIAL // Throughout the Universe, astronomers have discovered the signature of formaldehyde, a chemical that is now a poison to the human body, but which is now considered to be the source of all organic carbon solids that permeate our solar system, and enabled life to develop here.
Organic chemicals are a special class of substances that contain carbon, the basic element underlying life here on Earth. Organic carbon solids can be found in comets, asteroids, as well as on larger celestial bodies, such as the Saturnine moons Titan and Enceladus.
For years, experts have been trying to figure out how was it that organic chemicals appeared in the solar system. Finally, some proposed that conditions in the early solar system may have been just right to promote the development of these chemicals out of formaldehyde.
Astronomers now believe that – soon after the Sun was formed – large amounts of carbon and water were lost to space. The carbon that endured was trapped inside solid bodies such as planetoids.
During the new investigation, which was led by Carnegie Institution in Washington expert George Cody, it was revealed that organic carbon solids originated in a formaldehyde-derived polymer.
“We may owe our existence on this planet to interstellar formaldehyde. And what's ironic about it, is that formaldehyde is poisonous to life on Earth,” Cody says, quoted by Daily Galaxy.
What the team did was basically develop a way to reproduce all of the types of organic matter that could be found in organic-rich meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites, in the early days of the soalr system. Formaldehyde was among the substances within.
The materials they were able to synthesize artificially from this chemical were the most similar to those recovered from actual carbonaceous chondrites, that fell to Earth over the past 4.6 billion years.
The newly-obtained chemicals were also of the same composition with organic substances retrieved by the now-defunct NASA Stardust mission from comet Wild 2. The spacecraft visited the celestial body in 2004, and returned samples from its surface back to Earth in 2006.
If the new idea is true, then the implications are staggering. The set of conditions that our solar system went through early on in its history appear in all developing star systems.
Combine this with the fact that formaldehyde is present throughout the Universe, and you get the recipe for the formation of organic materials in nearly all star systems in the galaxy, and in the Cosmos as well.
Water and organic molecules are the primary ingredients required for the development of life as we know it, so the search for extraterrestrials may have just gotten a lot easier.