LIFE may have been built on a foundation of cyanide formed in the fiery wakes of asteroids.
Some think that comets and asteroids seeded the young Earth with the organic material that life requires. The problem with this idea is that much of the material would have burned up on impact.
Now it seems this seeding could have occurred in a different way. Seiji Sugita of the University of Tokyo, Japan, and Peter Schultz of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, fired projectiles made of organic material at metal targets at up to 6 kilometres per second. The projectiles were vaporised, but a lot of cyanide was created in the process.
Cyanide compounds are very reactive, so reactions on early Earth could have led to the more complex organic molecules that life needed (Geophysical Research Letters,
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