NASA has known about the PAH (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon) contents of space dust for three decades. It seems that this dust is more organically rich than one would expect from “the lifeless void.” It even glows red. Now NASA thinks
this red glow is coming from the chicken-wired-shaped PAHs”lots of them:
quote:
NASA scientists have discovered evidence that a mysterious red glow, seen throughout the Milky Way and other galaxies but never on Earth, radiates from extremely fine dust clusters that cause the glow by combining molecular forces that oppose each other.
Researchers theorize that the red glow, called the Extended Red Emission (ERE), is due to a very unusual form of charged molecular clusters. Measured in billionths of a meter (billionths of a yard), these tiny clusters are made of carbon-rich molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) that are chicken-wire shaped...
According to scientists, this research has important implications in other areas as well, including combustion processes and exotic nano-materials. For instance, the formation of soot particles produced by diesel and jet engine combustion is not well understood. Self-forming PAH clusters may be the key step to understanding this process.
Evidence suggests there is closed-shell charged PAH ions in flames, and the highly robust yet unusual closed-shell PAH clusters described here may be the soot nucleation sites in flames, a result that has been long anticipated.
Maybe our abiogenic Mom was a soot nucleation site. With all this rich, red dust floating around in space, you'd think that something organically interesting would come out of it, given a suitable planetary surface to conduct it chemical affairs.
The "flames" part is interesting too, bringing heat into the picture. The late astrophysicist Thomas Gold posited two theories about natural gas and abiogenesis:
the "deep, hot biosphere" theory, inclusive of the "deep-earth gas theory". Both of these theories make use of abundant souces of organics from space and the heat of accretion. Gold theorized that most of Earth's natural gas and petroleum resources are not biogenic, but instead originated from the organic content of space particles that accreted to form Earth.
In light of NASA's interest in red space dust and its PAH content, does this sugest that abiogenesis appears more universally probable as a chemical event than it did before? Is the likelihood of abiogenesis occurring extraterrestrially increased by NASA's discovery? Wouldn't this make Earth more contagiously vulnerable to an epidemic of panspermia? (With all that red chicken wire around, there must be red chickens somewhere!) Or does it suggest more simply that abiogenesis on Earth could have been aided by this PAH-rich red dust? (No bird-flu metaphors need apply!)
”HM
Edited by AdminPhat, : edited topic title
™ Version 4.2