It was long ago when the life sprout on Earth, we all know that but now the scientists know when exactly it happened. It was the stellar baby boom period of the Milky Way that sparked a flowering and crashing of life here on Earth.
Frenzied star-making in the Milky Way Galaxy starting about 2400 million years ago had extraordinary effects on life on Earth. Harvests of bacteria in the sea soared and crashed in a succession of booms and busts, with an instability not seen before or since. The variability in the productivity of life is closely linked to the cosmic rays, the atomic bullets that rain down on the Earth from exploded stars. They were most intense during a baby boom of stars, many of which blew up.
The researchers counted the amount of carbon-13 within sedimentary rocks, the most common rocks exposed on the Earth’s surface. When algae and bacteria were growing in the oceans, they took in carbon-12, so the ocean had an abundance of carbon-13.
What we know now is that life arose on Earth very quickly after the initial heavy bombardment slowed down. Very quickly, you know what I mean, a few hundred million years. That imply fast enough to mean that life probably arose several times, each time getting wiped out in a new wave of bombardments, and then finally the meteorites striking the surface of the earth to kind of liquefy it. Here again, we have no proof that repeated chemical evolution of life happened, but the speed with which it did happen, at least once, implies that it’s not a particularly doubtful process.
If there is evidence of fossil bacteria from that time, it can not be denied that there is life everywhere in the universe where there is water. Then space community needs to hurry up and send those critical missions out there so that we have our answers.
Via: CNN
