NASA Scientist reveals Sun's early behaviour impacted development of life on Earth

In a recent interview, NASA scientist Vladimir Airapetian has revealed some shocking facts about the Sun. The NASA scientist revealed that billions of years the Sun was fainter but also way more active than it is now. The “Young Sun” was throwing out huge flares of radiation which helped in shaping the evolution of life as we know it. According to scientist Vladimir Airapetian, by understanding what our Sun was like when life emerged, scientists can understand other stars in the galaxy. This will also help to predict whether life could emerge on planets there, too. Read on to know more.

Source: NASA

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How did the Sun evolve?

According to the NASA website, the scientist stated in his interview that Sun is a magnetic star. After certain intervals of time, large bundles of magnetic field emerge from the solar surface and form Sunspots. Sunspots are regions of the enhanced magnetic field, known as "Active Regions". The strong magnetic field in the Sunspot regions moves due to the surface convection. At some points, it can also generate magnetic tornadoes and hurricanes.

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Dr Airapetian further revealed that the Sun was a very magnetically active star. It rotated up to 10 times faster than it is today, thus producing large Sunspots. Hence, it generated large and frequent flares. These frequent superflares could be 100 times more energetic than the largest solar flare ever observed on our Sun, in current times. 

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How has the evolution of the Sun affected life on Earth?

Source: Unsplash

Life as we know it has three essential requirements. The first requirement is to have liquid water. The Sun reportedly was also the one important contributor to the presence of water because it produced greenhouse gases. 

The second requirement is to have a chemistry and an atmosphere that can eventually be broken into those complex molecules. Many scientists believe that the Sun had produced an abundant amount of nitrous oxide, which is one of the gases which helps to heat it to the temperatures to allow liquid water. Hence, these were essential and they became more and more complex on the surface.

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How did life start on Earth when there was no oxygen in the atmosphere?

Life started on Earth about 3.8 billion years ago, but the atmosphere at that time had little or no oxygen. According to NASA scientist Vladimir, the lack of oxygen was one of the most important conditions to start biological molecules. This is because oxygen oxidises the simple molecules, thus causing a hindrance in creating complexity. Complex molecules like carbon monoxide need little oxygen but the opposite is true with carbon dioxide. Hence, it can be said that the atmosphere was mildly reducing, meaning that it had some hydrogen, there was carbon dioxide, a little bit methane, nitrogen, that was the one essential component of life.