Comets Probably Didn’t Bring Life’s Building Blocks to Earth – Gizmodo

Comets Probably Didn’t Bring Life’s Building Blocks to Earth  GizmodoComets probably didn’t seed life on Earth after all, new study suggests  Phys.orgScientists Ran 100,000 Simulations of Comets Striking Earth. The Results Are a Surprise.  ScienceAlertAncient Comets Carried Organic Compounds, But They Didn’t Survive Crashing Into Earth  Universe TodayDid comets bring life to Earth? New Cambridge study weighs in  Mashable

“It’s kind of a romantic idea, but our results suggest it’s highly unlikely.” As NASA says, comets are “cosmic snowballs” of frozen gases, rock, and dust that include a good amount of organic materials. Accordingly, scientists have long suggested that a comet brought these molecules to Earth and that they became the building blocks for life here. But a new study explains how that scenario might actually be impossible. It’s very likely that comets carrying organic materials have crashed into Earth at some points in our distant past. The issue, however, has to do with whether these fragile molecules survived its vessel’s violent entry—and the odds are very slim, as researchers explained in a study published today in Scientific Reports.

According to the paper, modeling simulations strongly suggest that comets travel too fast and at too sharp an angle to Earth’s atmosphere for the molecules to escape vaporization. “Historically, scientists thought that comets were important for the origin of life on Earth, because they carried carbon- and nitrogen-bearing molecules,” Richard Anslow, the study’s lead author and an astronomer at Cambridge University in the U.K., said in a statement. “So