http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2008-12-08-asteroid-collisions_N.htm
"Asteroid impacts, which have been fingered for killing off the dinosaurs and other mass extinctions, may have helped kick-start life in the first place, experiments by Japanese researchers suggest.
Earth's oceans formed about 4.3 billion years ago, a time when lunar craters suggest Earth suffered a bombardment of comet and asteroid chunks, note the researchers led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of Japan's Tohoku University....Perhaps "the bulk of the organic molecules necessary for life's origins were (created) by oceanic impacts of extraterrestrial objects," Furukawa and colleagues say in the current edition of the journal Nature Geoscience. Most asteroids contain some carbon, the basic element in organic molecules. So the researchers investigated whether an asteroid impact could serve as a chemistry lab for cooking up the ingredients for living tissues, the "pre-biotic soup" that some biologists suggest led to life.
..."This report lends support to the exciting hypothesis that terrestrial planets and icy moons are predisposed to origins of life" delivered by carbon-rich meteorite impacts, says astrobiologist Lisa Pratt of Indiana University in Bloomington. The new study has the "unexpected twist" of adding newly formed organic molecules from the impact event to any matter already inside the meteorite, Pratt says. "The long list of ingredients in pre-biotic soup just got longer."
~ Dan Vergano
