[LINK] "Titan's Haze Could Hold Recipe for Life, No Water Needed"

[rfmcdonald]

News like this is doing a good job of convincing me that life is a property of the universe, that wherever suitable niches exist there will be life just as surely as if sufficient material orbits a young star there will be planets.

[A]n experiment that simulates chemical reactions in the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn’s haze-shrouded moon, adds a new location to the list of unexpected places where life could have begun — in the sky.

The study used radio waves as an energy source, simulating the action of ultraviolet radiation from the sun that strikes the top of Titan’s thick atmosphere and breaks apart molecules such as methane and molecular nitrogen. The experiment is the first to produce amino acids and the nucleotide bases that make up DNA and RNA — the basic ingredients of life — without the need for liquid water, says Sarah Hörst of the University of Arizona in Tucson. She and her colleagues presented the findings in Pasadena, Calif., October 7 at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences.

The results suggest that Titan’s upper atmosphere, about 1,000 kilometers above the frigid moon’s surface, produces compounds capable of supporting life. And because planetary scientists believe that Titan represents a frozen snapshot of the early Earth, the study also indicates that terrestrial life might have formed within a primordial haze high above the planet rather than in a primordial soup on the surface, Hörst says.

Planetary scientist Jonathan Lunine of the University of Arizona, who was not part of the study, notes that the compounds found in the experiment “are relatively simple precursor molecules to life, and so there are a lot of additional steps between such molecules and life itself, most of which will likely require a liquid, such as water or methane.” However, he adds, everything that forms high in Titan’s atmosphere ends up in the moon’s lakes and seas of methane.