Take Titan's atmosphere out of the tanning booth and into the microwave oven, and what do you get – not just an opportunity for pre-biotic molecules, but the fundamental building blocks, or nucleotides, of DNA and RNA, as well as some simple amino acids, which make up proteins.
In this case, another team of chemists at the University of Arizona subjected gas mixed to Titan's recipe to microwaves, to mimic energy hitting the top of Titan's atmosphere. The gas also formed aerosols. But when the team analyzed the aerosols, they found that the tiny particles included compounds such as cytosine, adenine, thymine, guanine, and uracil – which play key roles in DNA and RNA.
The team presented its results at a planetary science conference in October. If its mimicry is accurate, as on Titan, so on a very young Earth, complex pre-biotic molecules could literally have fallen from the skies.
