A new study has found that the first building blocks of life on Earth may have been formed by eruptions from the Sun. The research shows how solar particles, colliding with gases in Earth’s early atmosphere, can form amino acids and carboxylic acids, which are the basic building blocks of proteins and organic life. The findings were published in the journal Life. The study suggests that our active young Sun could have catalyzed the precursors of life more easily, and perhaps earlier, than previously assumed. The research team created a mixture of gases matching early Earth’s atmosphere as we understand it today and shot the gas mixtures with protons (simulating solar particles) or ignited them with spark discharges (simulating lightning), replicating the Miller-Urey experiment for comparison. As long as the methane proportion was over 0.5%, the mixtures shot by protons (solar particles) produced detectable amounts of amino acids and carboxylic acids. But the spark discharges (lightning) required about a 15% methane concentration before any amino acids formed at all.
