Building Blocks For Life Have Been Found Within Planet-Forming Dust Clouds - ScienceAlert

Astrophysicists who set out to map the building blocks of life across space have found precursor molecules lurking in dust clouds destined to become future solar systems.

For all of its splendid diversity, all life on Earth is built out of the same packet-mix recipe of organic molecules and minerals in lukewarm water.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, Ilee and his team gathered light from a number of protoplanetary disks in search of the spectral signatures of various organic molecules.

The spectral fingerprints of these particular precursor molecules (above) suggests they tend to be concentrated in the inner regions of the planet-forming disks.

Putting it another way, that packet-mix of organic dust that created life with just a dash of water on Earth isn't all that special.