Across the galaxy, craters serve as a reminder of the frequency with which celestial objects crash into one another. Here on Earth, people recognize such collisions as largely destructive; they are thought to have triggered large-scale extinction events in our planet’s history. But now researchers have confirmed that such impacts have the potential to also give rise to life, generating the amino acids needed to build proteins.
A team reporting in Nature Geoscience this week (September 15) replicated the impact shock of colliding astronomical bodies using a specialized gun to shoot high velocity, steel projectiles into icy mixtures with chemical compositions similar to comets. Hurling forward at seven kilometers per second, the projectiles triggered shock waves so intense that, upon impact, they caused amino acid ...
