Don’t tell me anything about Aliens
The discovery, sure to be controversial, suggests life could arise earlier than now thought on alien planets, too.
Currently, scientists widely believe photosynthetic microbes helped oxygenate the planet roughly 2.4 billion years ago, and that oxygen was scant in the atmosphere before then. They base this idea on isotopes of sulfur in ancient rocks. Isotopes of sulfur all behave virtually the same chemically but have slightly different masses.
New signs of life
Rocks older than 2.4 billion years contain abnormal ratios of sulfur isotopes compared with younger rocks. The only way known to generate these abnormal ratios are reactions between sunlight and sulfurous volcanic gas in the absence of an ozone shield that would normally help screen out ultraviolet rays.
Ozone is a form of oxygen, and if the atmosphere has no ozone, it is assumed it has no oxygen.
Geochemist Hiroshi Ohmoto, director of the Penn State Astrobiology Research Center and his colleagues examined rocks from western Australia laid down as sediments on a lakebed and the ocean floor between about 2.76 and 2.92 billion years ago. These displayed sulfur isotope ratios like those of more modern rocks from higher oxygen eras.
“‘When did the Earth’s atmosphere become oxygenated?’ has been an important question for Earth scientists and biologists, because this question is closely linked to those related to the biological evolution on Earth and other planets,” Ohmoto told LiveScience. “According to the currently popular theory, it took the Earth for more than 2 billion years to develop an oxygen-rich atmosphere.”
Info: From Yahoo from Live Science to here.
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