We are made of the same stuff as stars. Every atom and element in our bodies were made in the same big ways that stars are made. We are sure of this. But there are still many different ideas about where life on Earth came from. Some scientists say that life began on Earth, while others say that meteorites and comets brought it here.
Now, a study makes an interesting case that DNA, the very stuff that makes life possible, came from space. The research was written up in the journal Nature Communications. Nucleobases, which are parts of DNA, have been found in meteorites by scientists.
The scientists looked at parts of three meteorites. In 1950, one of them fell to Earth. It happened near the town of Murray in the US state of Kentucky. The second meteorite they looked at fell near Murchison in the Australian state of Victoria in 1969. The third one fell in the year 2000 in the Canadian province of British Columbia.
“There is still a lot to learn about the chemical steps that led to the first self-replicating system, which was the beginning of life on Earth. “This research adds to the list of chemical compounds that would have been in the early Earth’s prebiotic soup,” Danny Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight and co-author of the study told Reuters.
The results of this study support the idea that the building blocks of life came from somewhere other than Earth.