A popular origin-of-life story says comets delivered key ingredients such as hydrogen cyanide to the early Earth. Researchers from Cambridge and Edinburgh tested it with 100,000 simulations, reports the Dutch science site Scientias.nl. A comet has to clear three hurdles: survive the atmosphere (those under about 100 metres break apart), survive the heat of impact at around 28 km per second, and land on dry ground, because seawater dilutes the chemical almost at once.

In more than half of the runs no comet delivered usable material to land, and what did arrive was diluted within days or weeks. The study only covers comets, so life's raw materials probably came from elsewhere. A tidy story, tested against numbers instead of taken on trust.

Source: Andrei Stiru, Scientias.nl (Dutch) (2026-10-28)

Summarised by the FTI newsdesk.