Linking Molecular Chirality and Supernovae
In a white paper released today, available online here, astronomers seek to explain the chirality of the chemistry of life. Biochemists have long sought the answer to why living creatures on this planet only make use of one type of amino acids in their proteins. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins can occur in what is called a left-handed or right-handed form. This chemical chirality may be linked to supernovae events. The authors “invoke the weak interaction to perform selective destruction of one chirality or symmetry of molecules.” Furthermore, if the hypothesis described in this white paper is valid, the authors conclude that our biomolecules were “created in the molecular clouds of the galaxy, with their enantiomerism determined by supernovae, and subsequently either transported to Earth in meteorites, swept up as the Earth passed through molecular clouds, or included in the mixture that formed Earth when the planets were created.”