Comet Impacts Create Ingredients of Life

A group of international scientists including a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher have confirmed that life really could have come from out of this world.

The team shock compressed an icy mixture, similar to what is found in comets, which then created a number of amino acids -- the building blocks of life. The research appears in advanced online publication Sept. 15 on the Nature Geoscience journal website.

This is the first experimental confirmation of what LLNL scientist Nir Goldman first predicted in 2010 and again in 2013 using computer simulations performed on LLNL’s supercomputers, including Rzcereal and Aztec.