• Simulating Early Ocean Vents Shows Life’s Building Blocks Form Under Pressure (JPL)

While it’s highly unlikely a smashed up asteroid like Bennu could be home to any form of life, there are plenty of other places in our solar system that seem like just maybe life could be possible. 

To understand where to look for life, we need to understand how life came to be on our own planet. Over the years, folks have debated where on Earth life might have started, and one of today’s dominant ideas has life starting at hydrothermal vents. In new research published in the journal Astrobiology, researchers in JPL’s Icy Worlds team have worked to simulate the conditions that might have existed at hydrothermal vents on Earth when our solar system was young and life was just starting. This was part of the graduate work of Lauren White, who brought together hydrogen-rich water such as flows out vents, seawater enriched with CO2, and the same mixture of minerals that were present in these regions. This was all done in a high pressure system that could simulate the moderate temperatures and high-pressures expected to have existed … and at a scale sufficient for them to observe how fluids flowed and mixed. This was a large lab experiment, the likes of which had never previously been done. But when you’re trying to simulate the formation of the chemistry required for life… sometimes it’s go big or learn nothing.

And this team learned something. 

They found that the natural pulsations, pressures, and flows of hydrothermal vents are capable of forming the organic molecules formate and methane.  This is just a first step in this research, but as now Dr White states, “I think it’s really significant that we showed that these reactions take place in the presence of those physical factors, like the pressure and the flow. We are still a long way from demonstrating that life could have formed in these environments. But if anyone ever wants to make that case, I think we’ll need to have demonstrated the feasibility of every step of the process; we can’t take anything for granted.”

If life can start at hydrothermal vents, this means our list of possibly habitable works includes a myriad of icy moons in our own solar system, and more worlds then we dare count that are out there orbiting alien stars.