How people appeared on Earth: representatives of the scientific community are constantly busy searching for the roots of human evolution, and it seems that they have found one of connections with gravitational waves permeating the universe.
This information was reported by the IFL Science resource, reports URA-Inform.
Scientists' guesses
This amazing theory was published by researchers from King's College London as a preprint. Although their paper is still awaiting peer review and approval by the scientific community, it is already generating enormous interest.
The authors of the work recalled that for the existence of known forms of life we need only a few chemical elements: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus, and also sulfur. Some simple types of life are even limited to this basic set.
The First Cause of Life on Earth
The first of these elements, hydrogen, appeared in the universe as a result of the Big Bang. The next three are the product of helium fusion during the life of ordinary stars. Phosphorus was found in the remnants of supernova Cassiopeia A, supporting the idea that it is produced by explosions of this type of star. Supernovae also create sulfur and greatly increase the amount of carbon and oxygen in space, which they generously distribute around them.
This observation has been made before, but the authors of the new paper note that the merger of neutron stars is a consequence of gravitational waves. Considering the scale of the universe, the probability of collisions of such rare objects as neutron stars is extremely small.
General information about cosmic phenomena
Neutron stars — ; they are the product of supernovae, which are not powerful enough to become black holes. When a binary system of two stars with masses between 10 and 25 solar masses forms, each of them can turn into a neutron star. Provided that neither explosion ejects one of the pair into space, the stars will continue to orbit each other.
Without gravitational waves, kilonovae would be a much rarer phenomenon in space than they are now. The possibility of such collisions is so small that in a gravity-free Universe the probability of their occurrence during the life of the Milky Way would be extremely low. This is what eventually led scientists to answer the question of how people appeared on Earth.
Recall that scientists found the egg of a giant beast (photo).