“Superflares and the Origins of Life on Earth: New Research”

Jakarta –

How did planet Earth form and life on it originate? Scientists suspect that early life on Earth was triggered by superflares or violent solar storms when the Sun was young.

Scientists have been baffled by the conditions that gave rise to life on Earth since the 1800s, when it was speculated that life might have started in an ‘ancient chemical soup’.

By shooting charged particles found in solar storms at gaseous concoctions present in Earth’s early atmosphere, scientists discovered that these combined materials make up significant amounts of amino acids and carboxylic acids – the building blocks of proteins and all organic life. In the 1950s, experiments exposing a gas mixture of methane-ammonia-water-hydrogen molecules to artificial lightning formed 20 amino acids as a result of the process, Live Science reported.

However, in recent years, the picture has become complicated. Scientists found that Earth’s early atmosphere contained less ammonia and methane than previously thought, and more carbon dioxide and molecular nitrogen. Molecular carbon dioxide and nitrogen are gases that require more energy to decompose than lightning alone can provide.

Now, new research published April 28, 2023 in the journal Life, uses particle acceleration to find that cosmic rays from extremely powerful superflares can provide the jump-start needed for life on Earth.

“Most researchers ignore galactic cosmic rays because they require special equipment, such as particle accelerators. I was fortunate to be able to access some of them near our facility,” said lead study author Kensei Kobayashi, a chemistry professor at Yokohama National University in Japan.

Stars generate strong magnetic fields, which are created by the flow of electric charges in the liquid plasma flowing along and beneath their surface. Sometimes, these magnetic field lines form knots before suddenly breaking, releasing energy in bursts of radiation called solar flares and explosive jets of solar material called coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

Superflares, aka powerful solar storms of this kind, generally only happen once every 100 years or so, but they may not always be the case. By looking at data from NASA’s Kepler mission, between 2009 and 2018 it collected information about Earth-like planets and their stars. A 2016 study in the journal Nature Geoscience showed that during Earth’s first 100 million years, the Sun was 30% dimmer, but superflares exploded from its surface every three to 10 days.

To see what role superflares could have played in creating amino acids on ancient Earth, researchers of the new study combined carbon dioxide, molecular nitrogen, water and varying amounts of methane into a mixture of gases that could be found in Earth’s early atmosphere. Then, by shooting the gas mixture with protons from a small particle accelerator (known as a tandem accelerator) or igniting it with simulated lightning, scientists trigger the production of amino acids and carboxylic acids – both of which are essential chemical prerequisites for the creation of life.

As the researchers increased the concentration of the methane content, the amino acids and carboxylic acids produced by both protons and lightning increased, but to produce them at detectable levels, the proton mixture required only a methane concentration of 0.5%, while lightning required 15%.

“And even at 15% methane levels, the rate of production of amino acids by lightning is millions of times lower than that of protons,” said Vladimir Airapetian, one of the study’s authors, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who also worked on the Nature study. Geoscience in 2016.

“During cold conditions, lightning never occurred, and the early Earth was under a fairly dim Sun. This is not to say amino acids couldn’t have come from lightning, but lightning seems less likely now, and solar particles seem more likely,” explained Airapetian.

Watch Video “Scientists Predict the Occurrence of a Star Swallowing Earth“

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