Amira Shehata wrote Friday, November 17, 2023 01:00 AM
Scientists have long believed that the building blocks of life may have arrived on Earth Guilty textwhich is a frozen piece of rock and ice in space, and research now indicates that this could happen to other planets in the Milky Way, so the movement of comets is slowed as they pass from planet to planet, ensuring that the necessary molecules are able to survive the collision.
According to what the British newspaper “Daily Mail” reported, scientists say that the best place to search for extraterrestrial life is the habitable zone in systems where planets are closely clustered together, and this is what happened.
“We’re learning more about exoplanetary atmospheres all the time, so we wanted to find out if there were planets where complex molecules could also be delivered by comets,” says the study’s lead researcher, Richard Anslow of the University of Cambridge.
He added, “It is possible that the molecules that gave rise to life on Earth came from comets, so the same could be true for planets elsewhere in the galaxy.”
Comets are rich in prebiotic compounds that can form the building blocks of organic life, and comets also contain large amounts of hydrogen cyanide (HCN), which is an important molecule for the basis of life.
However, comets must move at less than 9.3 miles per second (15 km/s) for the vehicles to survive the heat and force of planetary impacts, and for smaller planets like Earth, impact speeds can exceed 12.4 miles per second (20 km/s). /sec), at which point only 0.2% of the HCN survives.
However, the researchers found that comets could slow down to the correct speed if they passed through a chain of exoplanets.
Conditions are better where planets orbit their star in a tight cluster, rather than spread out across the orbital plane, and this discovery will allow scientists to narrow down the selection of planets where life can be found.
