Origin of Terrestrial Bioorganic Homochirality and Symmetry Breaking in the Universe

The origin of terrestrial bioorganic homochirality is one of the most important and unresolved problems in the study of chemical evolution prior to the origin of terrestrial life. One hypothesis advocated in the context of astrobiology is that polarized quantum radiation in space, such as circularly...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Symmetry (Basel) 2019-07, Vol.11 (7), p.919
Main Authors: Takahashi, Jun-ichi, Kobayashi, Kensei
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Astrobiology
Asymmetry
bioorganic homochirality
Broken symmetry
Chemical evolution
Circular polarization
circularly polarized photon
Context
Elementary particles
Hypotheses
Interstellar chemistry
Interstellar matter
Leptons
Meteors & meteorites
parity violation in the weak interaction
spin-polarized lepton
Symmetry
Universe
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Summary:The origin of terrestrial bioorganic homochirality is one of the most important and unresolved problems in the study of chemical evolution prior to the origin of terrestrial life. One hypothesis advocated in the context of astrobiology is that polarized quantum radiation in space, such as circularly polarized photons or spin-polarized leptons, induced asymmetric chemical and physical conditions in the primitive interstellar media (the cosmic scenario). Another advocated hypothesis in the context of symmetry breaking in the universe is that the bioorganic asymmetry is intrinsically derived from the chiral asymmetric properties of elementary particles, that is, parity violation in the weak interaction (the intrinsic scenario). In this paper, the features of these two scenarios are discussed and approaches to validate them are reviewed.
ISSN:2073-8994
2073-8994
DOI:10.3390/sym11070919