{"id":39465,"date":"2013-06-04T20:47:53","date_gmt":"2013-06-05T00:47:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetsave.com\/?p=36450"},"modified":"2013-06-04T20:47:53","modified_gmt":"2013-06-05T00:47:53","slug":"life-producing-phosphorus-was-brought-to-the-earth-by-meteorites-research-finds-raising-interesting-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetsave.com\/articles\/life-producing-phosphorus-was-brought-to-the-earth-by-meteorites-research-finds-raising-interesting-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"Life-Producing Phosphorus Was Brought To The Earth By Meteorites, Research Finds — Raising Interesting Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Phosphorus — an element essential to life as we know it — is only present on the surface of the Earth as a result of being brought here by meteorites, according to new research. The finding doesn’t offer any answers with regards to the question of whether or not life originated on the Earth, or was brought here by meteorites, but it does make it clear that without meteorites that life as we know it couldn’t live here.<\/p>\n

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Image Credit: NASA<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The new research — from the University of South Florida, the University of Washington and the Edinburg Centre for Carbon Innovation — has uncovered a solid explanation for “how the reactive phosphorus that was an essential component for creating the earliest life forms came to Earth.”<\/p>\n

The researchers discovered that “during the Hadean and Archean eons — the first of the four principal eons of Earth’s earliest history — the heavy bombardment of meteorites provided reactive phosphorus that when released in water could be incorporated into prebiotic molecules. The scientists documented the phosphorus in early Archean limestone, showing it was abundant some 3.5 billion years ago.”<\/p>\n