Space.com reports: Life on Earth may owe its existence to incredibly powerful storms that erupted on the sun long ago, a new study suggests.

Potent and frequent solar eruptions could have warmed the planet enough for life to take root, and also provided the vital energy needed to transform simple molecules into the complex building blocks of life, such as DNA, researchers said.

The first organisms evolved on Earth about 4 billion years ago. This fact has long puzzled scientists, because in those days, the sun was only about 70 percent as bright as it is today.

“That means Earth should have been an icy ball,” study lead author Vladimir Airapetian, a solar scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. “Instead, geological evidence says it was a warm globe with liquid water. We call this the Faint Young Sun Paradox.” [Continue reading…]