New research shows how comets could be a source of extraterrestrial life in planets outside of our solar system.
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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    In its early history, Earth was bombarded with impacts from asteroids, comets and other cosmic bodies leftover from the formation of the solar system.

    With that question in mind, a team of researchers from University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy developed mathematical models that helped them show how comets could theoretically deliver similar building blocks of life to other planets in the Milky Way galaxy.

    “We’re learning more about the atmospheres of exoplanets all the time, so we wanted to see if there are planets where complex molecules could also be delivered by comets,” study author Richard Anslow from the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy said in a statement.

    For example, in 2009, samples retrieved from Comet Wild 2 during NASA’s Stardust mission were found to contain glycine, an amino acid and a building block of protein.

    That means Anslow and his colleagues had to find scenarios where a comet crash in another solar system would be slow enough for these the ingredients for life to survive intact.

    For solar systems with stars similar to the sun, the lowest velocity impacts would be most likely in where multiple planets are tightly packed together, the researchers found through their simulations.

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