What chemical processes in space could have created the building blocks of life is being researched by chemists at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) in Prof Dr Wolfram Sander's team. In their experiments, the scientists are simulating the conditions in space to understand in detail how certain chemical reactions occur.
One theory says that the building blocks of life were not created on Earth. Cometary impacts may have brought amino acids, the basic units of proteins, to our planet. How such complex molecules could have formed in space is a question being investigated by Sander's team. The scientists are interested in processes in a condensed phase, i.e. in liquids, solids or on surfaces, into which there has been little research.
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