Life on a faraway planet -- if it's out there -- might not look anything like life on Earth. But there are only so many chemical ingredients in the universe's pantry, and only so many ways to mix them. Scientists have now exploited those limitations to write a cookbook of hundreds of chemical recipes with the potential to give rise to life. Their ingredient list could focus the search for life elsewhere in the universe by pointing out the most likely conditions -- planetary versions of mixing techniques, oven temperatures and baking times -- for the recipes to come together.
Life on a faraway planet -- if it's out there -- might not look anything like life on Earth. But there are only so many chemical ingredients in the universe's pantry, and only so many ways to mix them. A team led by scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has exploited those limitations to write a cookbook of hundreds of chemical recipes with the potential to give rise to life.
"The origin of life really is a something-from-nothing process," says Betül Kaçar, a NASA-supported astrobiologist and UW-Madison professor of bacteriology."But that something can't happen just once. Life comes down to chemistry and conditions that can generate a self-reproducing pattern of reactions."
The researchers focused their search on what are called comproportionation reactions. In these reactions, two compounds that include the same element with different numbers of electrons, or reactive states, combine to create a new compound in which the element is in the middle of the starting reactive states.
Looking for floppy ears and fuzzy tails out in the universe, however, probably isn't a winning strategy. Instead, Kaçar hopes chemists will pull ideas from the new study's recipe list and test them out in pots and pans simulating extraterrestrial kitchens.
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