If a massive solar storm came into contact with Earth today could destroy all our technology and take us back to the stone age. Luckily for us, events like this are extremely rare. However, four billion years ago this kind of “space weather” was common, but instead of unleashing the apocalypse may have been what caused life
http:. I //es.gizmodo .com / this-tiny -…
that is the alarming conclusion reached by a study published in the Nature Geoscience , which is based on a discovery of Kepler space telescope NASA’s young stars similar to our sun. This type of stars when “babies” are having a high activity in terms of eruptions, which release large amounts of energy for its solar flares, which cause climate space today just seems an afternoon drizzle.
Now, Vladimir Airapetian, NASA has shown that four billion years when our sun was so active makes as are these “baby stars “he would have created conditions on Earth to make it more habitable. According to models Airapetian, as solar flares collided with the Earth’s atmosphere were creating chemical reactions that produced warm climate through the greenhouse effect, and other basic ingredients for creating life on the planet.
An incredible amount of energy
“the Earth should have been completely frozen four billion years ago,” according Airapetian told Gizmodo (US), referring to the “paradox of the Sun young “who devised Carl Sagan and George Mullen in 1972. This began when Sagan and Mullen discovered that Earth had liquid water four billion years ago, a time for which the Sun was only 70% as bright as it is today. Airapetian said. “The only way to explain this is if somehow there had been a greenhouse effect on the planet”
Another conundrum of the early Earth is how the first biological molecules (DNA, RNA and proteins) accumulated enough nitrogen to form.
the new study proposes a fairly elegant solution to both problems, relating to space weather. The investigation began several years ago when Airapetian studying the magnetic activity of the stars using the Kepler database. Then he discovered that the stars of “G” (like our Sun) are quite explosive in his youth, since they frequently release pulses of energy that are the equivalent of hundreds of billions of atomic bombs.
“it’s an incredible amount of energy, so great that even hard for me to understand,” he told Gizmodo (United States) Ramses Ramirez, an astrobiologist at Cornell University who was not directly involved in the research but has collaborated on several Airapetian occasions.
the researcher then thought he could use this discovery (on “G” stars) to dig a little in the history of the solar system. Estimated that 4 billion years our Sun may have released dozens of flares and solar storms every few hours, which impacted the Earth’s atmosphere every day.
Using numerical models Airapetian was able to show that solar flares have been strong enough to compress the Earth magentósfera dramatically, or what is the same, the magnetic shield surrounding our planet. The constant “bombardment” of solar flares have opened a hole through the magnetosphere approximately over the planet’s poles, which allowed the entry of these solar storms in the atmosphere and their clash with nitrogen, carbon dioxide and methane. “This interaction of molecules in the atmosphere would have generated new molecules as a chain reaction,” according Airapetian.
the interaction of solar flares and the atmosphere would have produced nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas far more warming potential than CO2. Airapetian model suggests that sufficient nitrous oxide may have been produced to heat the planet. In addition, due to solar storms it would have produced hydrogen cyanide, which could have fertilized the surface with nitrogen to form the first blocks of life.
“Many have taken into account the lightning strike and meteors as necessary to initiate the chemical mechanism of nitrogen, “says Ramirez. “But nobody had thought so far in blame this to solar storms.”
Now it’s time for biologists to determine whether the exact mixture of molecules produced by flares solar would have been enough to start life on the planet. That research is already developing team at the Institute of Earth Sciences life in the city of Tokyo and more places, who are using the model to simulate the conditions Airapetian Earth yesteryear. If these experiments can produce amino acids and blocks of RNA, this could give much support to the theory that space weather helped generate life.
And help us understand the beginning of life and our origin, model Airapetian could help us understand if Mars had life or not in the past, a planet that also promises to have had liquid water four billion years ago.
currently we are just beginning to understand what is needed to determine a “habitable zone” around a star; For now only it has to do with the scope of its luster, but with more detailed information on the activity of stellar storms of the space body, we could understand much more the chemical composition of exoplanets.
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