What are sources of organic matter on planets?
During late accretion of Earth-like planets, organic compounds and water are delivered to planetary surfaces by comets and meteors. Surprisingly, a fraction of the organic compounds are able to stay intact during their arrival in the Earth’s atmosphere. We can still see the delivery of organic compounds to the Earth’s surface in the form of carbonaceous meteorites, both large and microscopic. It is likely that other organic compounds were synthesized in the Earth’s atmosphere, because experiments have been conducted that reproduce the process under simulated prebiotic conditions. However, because the Earth’s atmosphere now contains highly reactive oxygen as a result of photosynthetic activity, if organic compounds were synthesized by abiotic processes today they would be rapidly degraded by oxidation. What is meant by self-assembly? Certain organic compounds have the capacity to react with each other to form more complex molecules such as hydrocarbons, amino acids and simple sugars. So
