Posted: Oct 10, 2010 6:41 am
Calilasseia wrote:Actually, what you found was the abstract. The full paper is published in Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, vol 42, p.1068. Sadly, it's institutional access only at the moment, unless someone knows of an alternative source ...
EDIT: I found a second paper. This one can be downloaded freely from arXiv.
Thx cali. Not the exact same experiment though. In the one you linked they used X-rays and in the other Radiofrequency, and in the one you linked they only succeeded in producing Adenine. That's the thing that makes the new experiment so interesting, they got all five nucleobases in addition to some amino acids, and they only succeeded in identifying 7 of 18 total compounds produced.
This is pure speculation of course, but Imagine if the same or other plausible condidtions on Titan allow for the subsequent formation of Ribose and joining it to the base? We'd get RNA monomers. In all the experiments I have read about in prebiotic chemistry, they only produced one or two of the nucleobases, never all five.