Partial Ingredients For DNA And Protein Found Around Star

[emad]

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered some of life's most basic ingredients in the dust swirling around a young star. The ingredients - gaseous precursors to DNA and protein - were detected in the star's terrestrial planet zone, a region where rocky planets such as Earth are thought to be born.

The findings represent the first time that these gases, called acetylene and hydrogen cyanide, have been found in a terrestrial planet zone outside of our own.

"This infant system might look a lot like ours did billions of years ago, before life arose on Earth," said Fred Lahuis of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands and the Dutch space research institute called SRON. Lahuis is lead author of a paper to be published in the Jan. 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Lahuis and his colleagues spotted the organic, or carbon-containing, gases around a star called IRS 46. The star is in the Ophiuchus (pronounced OFF-ee-YOO-kuss), or "snake carrier," constellation about 375 light-years from Earth. This constellation harbors a huge cloud of gas and dust in the process of a major stellar baby boom. Like most of the young stars here and elsewhere, IRS 46 is circled by a flat disk of spinning gas and dust that might ultimately clump together to form planets.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/12/051229112518.htm

[HereSince1628]

1. But we seem to have started as an RNA world

DNAophilia is so, so, so...well just downright Cricky.

[Ediacara]

6. Since RNA and DNA only differ in a few atoms in the sugar

I suspect that RNA's building blocks are there too.

(and yes, I know Uracil replaces Thymine)

[soothsayer]

2. I wish them better luck than we've had! Earth 2.0

[crikkett]

3. ... Death Star rubble?

;)

[NNadir]

4. This is a very exciting find.

However acetylene, hydrogen cyanide, and water are all symmetric molecules.

Find the asymmetry and you will have found everything..

[Bill McBlueState]

5. that's cool

But still, there's a very big leap from hydrogen cyanide to nucleic acids.