Red soot from space—an abiogenic precursor?

NASA has known about the PAH (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon) contents of space dust for three decades. It seems that this dust is more organically rich than one would expect from “the lifeless void.” It even glows red. Now NASA thinks this red glow is coming from the chicken-wired-shaped PAHs”lots of them:

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NASA scientists have discovered evidence that a mysterious red glow, seen throughout the Milky Way and other galaxies but never on Earth, radiates from extremely fine dust clusters that cause the glow by combining molecular forces that oppose each other.

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Researchers theorize that the red glow, called the Extended Red Emission (ERE), is due to a very unusual form of charged molecular clusters. Measured in billionths of a meter (billionths of a yard), these tiny clusters are made of carbon-rich molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) that are chicken-wire shaped...

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According to scientists, this research has important implications in other areas as well, including combustion processes and exotic nano-materials. For instance, the formation of soot particles produced by diesel and jet engine combustion is not well understood. Self-forming PAH clusters may be the key step to understanding this process.

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Evidence suggests there is closed-shell charged PAH ions in flames, and the highly robust yet unusual closed-shell PAH clusters described here may be the soot nucleation sites in flames, a result that has been long anticipated.

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Maybe our abiogenic Mom was a soot nucleation site. With all this rich, red dust floating around in space, you'd think that something organically interesting would come out of it, given a suitable planetary surface to conduct it chemical affairs.The "flames" part is interesting too, bringing heat into the picture. The late astrophysicist Thomas Gold posited two theories about natural gas and abiogenesis: the "deep, hot biosphere" theory, inclusive of the "deep-earth gas theory". Both of these theories make use of abundant souces of organics from space and the heat of accretion. Gold theorized that most of Earth's natural gas and petroleum resources are not biogenic, but instead originated from the organic content of space particles that accreted to form Earth.In light of NASA's interest in red space dust and its PAH content, does this sugest that abiogenesis appears more universally probable as a chemical event than it did before? Is the likelihood of abiogenesis occurring extraterrestrially increased by NASA's discovery? Wouldn't this make Earth more contagiously vulnerable to an epidemic of panspermia? (With all that red chicken wire around, there must be red chickens somewhere!) Or does it suggest more simply that abiogenesis on Earth could have been aided by this PAH-rich red dust? (No bird-flu metaphors need apply!)”HMEdited by AdminPhat, : edited topic title

Ashes To Ashes...Dust To Dust.... Which Forum are you shooting for?I also would like to see a bit better topic name. Something shorter and more catchy.Any other Admins are welcome to comment

How about the "Origin of Life" thread with a title: "Red soot from space”an abiogenic precursor?"”HM

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

See RAZD - Building Blocks of Life

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So far over 130 different molecules have been discovered in interstellar clouds (2 anon 2004). Most contain a small number of atoms, and only a few molecules with seven or more atoms have been found so far. The most abundant family of molecules in the interstellar medium, after molecular hydrogen and carbon monoxide, are the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) molecules. These molecules contain about 10% of all the interstellar carbon (3 Bregman & Temi).

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As you say, they are well known, being observed in several places, many at distant interstellar locations that speak to their interstellar existence before life began on earth.

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In the farthest depths of the universe polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) molecules have been found by the Spitzer Space Telescope, 10 billion light-years away (4 Hill 2005). Other deep space organic compounds that have already been found are the 7-atom vinyl alcohol (5 anon 2001), the 8-atom molecule propenal and the 10-atom molecule propanal (2 anon 2004), all in interstellar clouds of dust and gas near the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, all some 24,000 light-years away - a distance so far, the molecules could not have come from earth.

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The red glow is interesting, but doesn't add to the question of prebiotic compounds accumulating on the surface of the earth: the evidence is substantial that this occurred.What the weak charge may be relevant for would be how molecules combined and accumulated. This is also similar to the weak charge in water molecules. How many PAH's does it take to make a simple amino acid?Enjoy.

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I'm not at all sure how much PAH's have to do with biomolucules anyway. Yes, they are "organic" hydrocarbons, but that is nearly all that's in 'em - carbon and hydrogen. My bets (and probably a bunch of my summer reading) are more on the polymers of cyanide, formaldehyde, and such that are also abundant in molecular clouds in space. We already have the evidence in hand of these in pristine meteorites - there's niacin in the Tagish Lake rock, amino acids including non-Earth ones in Murchison. And the chemical pathways are pretty straightforward to get to these.

RAZD wrote: These red-glowing chicken-wire structures of carbon don’t tell us anything more than we already knew, except that cyclic PAHs seem to become ever more ubiquitous in space with each new observation.You make a point that observations of PAHs at distances of 10 billion light years would mean that they could not have originated on Earth. True enough, since 10 billion light-years is two-thirds of the way across the universe and Earth is only 4.5 billion years old. About all we can say for sure is that the red soot is out there, apparently all over the place. Assuming those carbon atoms had to be hatched elementally inside stars and later distributed into space when the mother stars exploded, which must have taken at least 3-5 billion years to occur, then life in the universe could not be more than 10 billion years old. On Earth, of course, life could not be more than about 4 billion years old. Given these considerations, I have to assume that Earth’s experience with life is not unique.Unfortunately, this red dust doesn’t do much to differentiate the probability of abiogenesis occurring on Earth from that occurring extraterrestrially and arriving here by way of panspermia. No many, if you can find some nitrogen.”HM

Coragyps, you wrote: I have to agree. But it is remarkable to find them in these seemingly impossible places. Do you suppose there is organic chemistry going on in those "molecular clouds in space"? I'll assume there is. And why should this have anything to do with abiogenesis? Good question. As you say, there is no logical connection between PAHs and biomolcules...other than they are both "organic."”HM

Certainly what we see is that the pre-biotic soup does not need to be developed on earth to make abiogenesis a possibility: there are plenty of chemicals available that are on the path to becoming "organic" molecules.A form of pan-pre-spermia?

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To make some combinations they would need an energy source. This would be available near stars, but also with collisions of clouds. I'd say the evidence is that chemistry has occurred, and that conditions are likely sufficient for it to continue where ever there is opportunity. But that it is a lot easier to make organic biomolecules from pre-biotic molecules than it is to start from scratch (the usual creationist assumption), just as it is easier to build a house with existing bricks than it is to make the bricks and then build the house.Enjoy.

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Most definitely. There's huge amounts of icy "dust" particles out there with hydrogen cyanide, carbon monoxide, acetylene, and other simple red-giant effluvia in them, and there's plenty of ultraviolet light to hit the particles and cause reactions, even at 5 degrees K. Radioastronomy has found all sorts of products of those reactions - alcohols, polyacetylene with a cyanide on the end, etc. And Tagish Lake and Murchison show they can be delivered to Earth's surface intact.

That's not all. RAZD - Building Blocks of Life

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In addition, hollow, bubble-like hydrocarbon globules, similar to early membraneous formations (10 Watson 2002), and ''polyols,'' components of the nucleic acids RNA and DNA, constituents of cell membranes and cellular energy sources (11 Koczor 2001 & 12 Cooper et al 2001) have been detected in material from meteorites as well.
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Another experiment shows how cell-like membranes can be formed from common chemicals like calcium chloride, sodium carbonate, copper chloride, sodium iodide, hydrogen peroxide and starch and that they contain chemical reactions (33 Ball 2004), and another shows that these compounds are common in meteorite "ices" and that the meteorite compounds do form vesicles with the addition of water (34 Dworkin et al 2001).

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It could well be that membraneous vesicles preceded the formation of replicating molecules.

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Coragyps, you wrote: You may be further along with your readings about interstellar space dust than I am. (I seem to recall a time when discovering a simple organic molecule in space was breaking news.) Today, I found this report published by NASA in the year 2000 to be astonishing (to me at least):

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. researchers in Calcutta claim that interstellar clouds may produce large amounts of adenine. Their findings suggest that the raw materials of life may be common in other planetary systems.

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We all know adenine is a key player in molecular biology; it serves as a nucleotide base, it morphs into the energy carrier ATP, it participates in other ways essential to biological life. And now scientists have discovered, allegedly, that adenine occurs in space dust. Wow!What I want to make of this is either:1. “abiogenesis from scratch” may be aided by such pre-formed ingredients, which would seem to make the emergence of life more and more like a “cake mix” operation (the “Betty Crocker hypothesis”?),or2. adenine-bearing space dust has biogenic sources, which does not explain abiogenesis but adds a little to the argument for panspermia.I suppose both are possible too. Nevertheless, if it can be confirmed that adenine is a component of space dust, then extraterrestrial and/or interstellar pre-nucleotides now become feasible (just add a sugar phosphate). Hence, the emergence of a genetic code seems more probable with adenine around as a precursor. Why woundn't it be the key ingredient of abiogenesis? Or is it just evidence of unknown biogenic sources?”HM

RAZD, you wrote: This doesn't seem too far fetched to me. Organic scum on an aggitated water surface can roll up into vesicles made of phospholipid bilayers without any biological intervention (assuming the scum is abiogenic, of course). That's a big step toward a plasma membrane, isn't it?”HM

Doubtful. And there are known cyanide + UV light ways to make it - I just have to find the publication, or else reconstruct the pathway from first principles. Finding is more probable....