COMPLEX CHEMISTRY’S START INVOLVING NUCLEOSYNTHESIS
Time = 0 + Temperature 1e12 degrees.
1) Uncertainy as to what preceded quarks and gluons.
2) Quarks and Gluons
3) Gravity attracts matter to other matter.
4) Pressure from Dark Matter (important because its mass is much greater than that of Baryons).
5) Temperature dropping to <1e12 degrees.
Time=10ms
1a) 4-5% Baryons (protons & neutrons) – derived from condensed Quarks via the strong nuclear force.
1b) 28% Dark Matter
1c) 68% Dark Energy.
This is the beginning of the 1st Nucleosynthesis, forming nuclei but no atoms: D, 3He, 4He, 7Li + electrons
Time = 100ms 1st Nucleosynthesis ends. Temperature 1e9 degrees.
No atoms exist just nuceli of H, D, He, Li.
Time = 4e5 years. Temperature continues to drop.
1) Atoms start to form beginning with H2.
2) Temperature has reached 1e4 degrees. electrons combine with nuclei to form neutral atoms: H, D, He Li.
Time = 5e7- 5e8 years (last number used to be 1e8 now 5e8 due to very recent data collected by Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy probe (WMAP) and reported by Joanna Dunkley of Oxford & Princeton, a member of the WMAP team, on March 12th, 2008. WMAP was launched in 2001 to map the cosmic microwave background (CMB).It is mapping microwave light from its vantage orbit about four times further from the Earth than the Moon, following our planet around the Sun – the new data is available in Astrophysical Journal.
1) Accreted lumps of H & He 100-1000 solar masses undergo accelerated collapse followed by ignition to form the 1st huge stars. These stars have thermo nuclear fusion as their energy source.
2) 2nd Nucleosynthesis via collisions of H, He to form mainly 16O.
H forms He
3He forms 12C
12C + He forms 16O
Left with much less C than O
He depletion leads to cessation of this reaction chain, star collapses on itself & O burning starts with huge release of energy that blows the star apart. At the end there are still 8 elements H1 to O8, but they are too hot to combine.
At the end of this time period the composition of the 1st stars was of a hot dilute gas. The atoms to form water and polymers like protein (from condensing amino acids) were present but the conditions were not. Therefore any subsequent process arising to entrap water and slow its evaporation afforded the means for some complex chemicals to arise from H, He, Li, Be, B, C, N O (NB Li, Be & B were very low in amount relative to H, C, N, O).
Time =13Gyr-500-700million or a VERY VERY much shorter time.
The cooling phase of the 2nd generation stars afforded the first chance for polymer amide to be selectively formed from amino acids falling on water droplet surfaces and condensing.
EXPERIMENTS TO INVESTIGATE THE START OF COMPLEX CHEMISTRY – the difficulty of obtaining water devoid of air derived <100nm diameter particles:
A key question to understanding the start of complex chemistry is to determine the time it took for the chance selection of polymer amide on a water surface in the 2nd genereation stars. This could be an extremely difficult selection and then the time is 700million years OR it is extremely easy and then just a few tens of years. Water volumes at that time were likely to be relatively “clean”, whereas today all water ,even that which has been ultrapurified is likely to be contaminated with numerous airborne molecules smaller than 100nm diameter and less on the micron scale. Obtaining 100% water with no contaminating molecules like amino acids and within an ultra clean system to monitor protein formation, has so far proved difficult. The air contamination by 100nm and less particles cannot be elliminated and the attempted experiment below illistrates the problem:
We wished to establish whether ultrapure water droplets could be entrapped by amino acids that spontaneously condensed on their surface to form the entrapping skin. We had previously demonstrated that 75 amino acid protein polymers (proteolipid) could entrap water droplets (McGeoch & McGeoch 2008). A control experiment therefore had first to be performed involving pure water droplets in ultrapure air to demonostrate that pure water droplets have no entrapping polymer protein skin.
The CNS cleanrooms at Harvard can produce air that has matter less than 200nm diameter present. Ultrapure water (30µl) was pipetted into ultrapure 1ml bottles that were immediatedly capped at this cleanroom standard. The bottles were subsequently never uncapped and they were taken to a regular Harvard laboratory at room temperature. Within 2 hours at room temperature the bottles were examined and it was immediately apparent that the bottle walls were covered with droplets. Normally sonication is required to form water droplets on the walls of the bottles when less ultra pure air conditions are employed. As the droplets had formed in the absence of sonication this step was left out. Some bottles were uncapped and that led to the water droplets evaporating. The rest (approximately 50) have remained stable with droplets on the bottle walls for 1.5 years. This implies that some entrapping agent possibly polymer protein (in theory up to 666amino acids long) are in the bottle air (0.3-0.35nm = length of a single amino acid) and act to entrap the water in the control tubes. In fact cleaning the air above the experiment probably aided the water entrapment because the large micron sized contaminants of air (dust, pollen, skin etc) had been removed, thus the actual air comtaminants were now more homogeneous, and therefore acted more effectively with no competiton for access to the water droplet surface.
NB contaminants other than amino acids or protein could also be present up to 200nm diameter eg carbohydrate and lipid and their polymers and other carbon based polymers, light enough to float in air.
The only way to conduct the above control experiment is to essentially not perform the control i.e. In air as clean from particles as possible (<100nm diameter) ultra pure water would be placed in glass bottles, formed via sonication into droplets, with and without various combinations of ultra pure amino acids. At time intervals the bottle contents would be analyzed for protein and the amino acid sequence of the protein determined.