As NASA says, comets are “cosmic snowballs” of frozen gases, rock, and dust that include a good amount of organic materials. Accordingly, scientists have long suggested that a comet brought these molecules to Earth and that they became the building blocks for life here. But a new study explains how that scenario might actually be impossible.
It’s very likely that comets carrying organic materials have crashed into Earth at some points in our distant past. The issue, however, has to do with whether these fragile molecules survived its vessel’s violent entry—and the odds are very slim, as researchers explained in a study published today in Scientific Reports. According to the paper, modeling simulations strongly suggest that comets travel too fast and at too sharp an angle to Earth’s atmosphere for the molecules to escape vaporization.
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