Building blocks of life spotted around a comet

• Autores: Conor Gearin
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3076, 2016, pág. 10
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • A frosty comet could have delivered the ingredients for life on Earth. The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft has spotted an amino acid on the comet it orbits--confirming that a ball of ice and dust can hold one of life's major building blocks. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, which control essential reactions in living cells. Astrobiologists have long wondered whether they could have reached early Earth on the backs of comets or asteroids. Now Rosetta, which has been orbiting comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko since 2014, has definitively seen the amino acid glycine in the gas cloud surrounding the comet. The probe also picked up phosphorus, a component of DNA