Billions of years ago today, electric shocks increased the amount of phosphorus on Earth, creating the basic material for life.
A new study has found that lightning had scattered the essential elements of life on Earth and that life had become more complex since then. The research was conducted by Benjamin Hayes, a geology student at Yale University, who is also a central part of his Ph.D. dissertation.
Benjamin Hayes says phosphorus is an important element in driving life. But for billions of years it was not widely available on Earth and was trapped somewhere in the Earth’s insoluble minerals. In this study, experts have emphasized that when and how did this happen when phosphorus became useful and viable on Earth and thus it became the basic brick of the most basic components of life such as DNA, RNA and other living molecules. Form of
First, they considered specific meteorites called Schreibersite, which contain phosphorus. These rocks have been falling on the ground and their collision made it possible for life to wake up early. But this theory does not fit in that the first life or its basic components formed on the planet between three and a half to four and a half billion years, but in that period the collision of meteors was very rare.
But the same Schreibers discovered another place for phosphorus in meteorites called ‘flagrites’ and a kind of glass. But these glasses are also formed when there is a strong action of lightning, but they contain phosphorus in a soluble form.
After that a computer model was made and it was found that the ancient earth was struck by lightning one to five billion times a year and out of these 100 million to one billion times electricity must have fallen on the earth. In this way, the phosphorus trapped in the meteorites was released and was able to form the first biochemical.
In this way, it can be said that perhaps electric sparks paved the way for phosphorus and gave rise to the earliest form of life.
