Origin of Life: From Chemical Soup to Living Systems

Over hundreds of millions of years, gravity gathered these gases into massive clouds that collapsed under their own weight to form stars. Within these stellar furnaces, nuclear fusion gave rise to heavier elements like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and iron—the essential ingredients for life. When massive stars exhausted their fuel, they exploded as supernovae, scattering these life-enabling elements across the cosmos. These cosmic events seeded the interstellar medium with the raw materials from which new stars and planetary systems would emerge.

Around 4.6 billion years ago, in a relatively quiet corner of the Milky Way, one such cloud of gas and dust began to collapse. From this swirling disk, our Sun was born at its center, while the remaining material coalesced into planets, moons, asteroids, and comets. Among these was Earth—a rocky planet positioned at just the right distance from the Sun to allow liquid water, a crucial component for life as we know it.