In the confines of the solar system, more than 1.4 billion kilometers away, Orbit Titanthe Saturn’s biggest moon. A satellite with a dense and orange atmosphere with temperatures that are around -180 ºC, but despite this, it stands out for having clouds, rain, rivers, lakes and seas. Now we have on the table the first theories of how life would be forming there.
A first solid theory. For years, Scientists have wondered if in this exotic environment life could arise. Now, A new study Published in the International Journal of Astrobiology proposes a detailed and plausible mechanism on how the first precursor structures of life or Protocamples in its icy methane lakes.
The first ingredient of life. For life to begin, you need a border. Something that separates a chemical ‘inside’ from a chaotic ‘outside’. In the case of humans, that border is the cell membrane, A lipid bilayer that delimits the formation of vesicles. Something that according to scientific consensus is a key step and price to the appearance of life.
The big question is whether something similar could happen in a place without liquid water like Titan. The answer, according to the authors of the study, is a resounding yes.
A key molecule. To affirm something so categorically the most important thing are some Amphiphilic molecules. They are compounds with a polar head and a non -polar tail, like the lipids of our membranes. In this way, this structure allows self -assembly forming the membranes that give rise to vesicles.
In Titan’s atmosphere, solar radiation and energy particles constantly bombard nitrogen and methane, creating a complex organic molecules soup. Among them are organic nitriles that have precisely this amphipatic nature and could act as the bricks of these original membranes in a non -polar environment such as liquid methane.
A simple mechanism. The study not only posture that these membranes can exist, but also proposes a surprisingly simple and elegant mechanism for their formation, driven by the Titan climate itself. This process begins when the amphipatic compounds created in the atmosphere fall and accumulate on the surface of the methane lakes, forming a thin one -layer film, as if it were oil on the water.
When methane rain drops hit the surface of the lake, it causes splashes. They throw aerosols or small secondary drops of the lake itself that fall into the lake itself. Upon contact, its wrapping of a layer merges with the movie of a layer of the side that was already present and what we were looking for is formed: the double layer membrane.
In this way, a perfectly formed gallbladder is created that is dispersed in liquid methane, already these hypothetical titan vesicles have been called ‘D endosomas‘.
Of unstable bubbles to primitive evolution. Initially, these vesicles would be only ‘kinetically stable’, that is, temporary. But this is where the process becomes even more fascinating, since the study posture that once these vesicles would begin to interact with other organic molecules dissolved in the lake.
Those vesicles that by chance capture and integrate other amphiphils in their membrane that make them more stable, will survive more time. This would lead to a kind of natural selection at the molecular level: the most stable vesicles of vesicles would last and accumulate, while the least stable would get rid of.
This competition and selection process could lead to a primitive form of evolution, where vesicles develop a “compositional memory” based on molecules that make them more robust. It is a gigantic step that could lead to increasingly complex and functional structures, authentic protocamples.
How we will find them. All this is a brilliant hypothesis, but you have to check if it is true. The answer is in future space missions. One of the hopes is put In NASA’s great dragonfly missiona drone of the size of a car that will fly through the atmosphere of Titan from the mid -2030s to analyze different places of its surface.
With advanced technology. The authors propose an ideal instrument to conduct this research: a laser device. Ideally, it would be Raman spectroscopy, A technique that analyzes the chemical composition of the molecules. Using metal nanoparticles to amplify the signal in a massive way, it could identify the exact nature of the amphipatics that form vesicles, even in very low concentrations.
I should also have Combined light dispersion. A technique that allows you to point a laser to the liquid and measure how the light is dispersed, detect the presence of suspended particles, determine its size and, observing how they settle over time, differentiate the vesicles of dust or ice particles.
History in astrobiology. If a mission like Dragonfly found these vesicles, it would be one of the most important discoveries in the history of astrobiology. I would not confirm the existence of life, but would demonstrate that the first steps towards complexity and order, the previous conditions for life (abiogenesis), can occur in the universe in radically different conditions to those of the earth.
Images | Alessandro Ferrari
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