Journal
ORIGINS OF LIFE AND EVOLUTION OF BIOSPHERES
Volume 43, Issue 3, Pages 221-245Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s11084-013-9339-0
Keywords
Hydrogen cyanide; Redox-neutral atmosphere; Hypervelocity impacts; Aerodynamic ablation; Mass spectrometry; Emission spectroscopy
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Funding
- Japan Society for the Promotion Science
- Institute of Space and Astronautical Science of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, as a collaborative program of the Space Plasma Experiment.
- Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research [23340168, 25871212, 23103003, 23403015] Funding Source: KAKEN
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Cyanide compounds are amongst the most important molecules of the origin of life. Here, we demonstrate the importance of mid-size (0.1-1 km in diameter) hence frequent meteoritic impacts to the cyanide inventory on the early Earth. Subsequent aerodynamic ablation and chemical reactions with the ambient atmosphere after oblique impacts were investigated by both impact and laser experiments. A polycarbonate projectile and graphite were used as laboratory analogs of meteoritic organic matter. Spectroscopic observations of impact-generated ablation vapors show that laser irradiation to graphite within an N-2-rich gas can produce a thermodynamic environment similar to that produced by oblique impacts. Thus, laser ablation was used to investigate the final chemical products after this aerodynamic process. We found that a significant fraction (> 0.1 mol%) of the vaporized carbon is converted to HCN and cyanide condensates, even when the ambient gas contains as much as a few hundred mbar of CO2. As such, the column density of cyanides after carbon-rich meteoritic impacts with diameters of 600 m would reach similar to 10 mol/m(2) over similar to 10(2) km(2) under early Earth conditions. Such a temporally and spatially concentrated supply of cyanides may have played an important role in the origin of life.
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