Was life delivered to Earth by asteroids with a helping hand from Jupiter?

Earth got some of the key ingredients for life from asteroids in the inner solar system – with a little help from the solar system's largest planet, Jupiter, according to a recent study. To figure out why we’re all here, and whether anyone else might be out there in the universe, scientists have to start with a more basic question: how did Earth get its supply of the chemicals that make up living cells ? According to Rice University planetary scientist Rajdeep Dasgupta and his colleagues, Earth’s stockpile of phosphorus and nitrogen, two chemical elements essential to life , came mostly from chunks of rock that formed in the inner solar system . And that process might not have happened without Jupiter looming just outside the asteroid belt . "For our own solar system, Jupiter's presence and growth history indeed seem to have played a critical role in determining the distribution of the basic chemical ingredients necessary for habitable worlds," said Dasgupta in a NASA press release . "It remains an open question whether a life-essential elements budget similar to Earth's can be estimated without a Jupiter-like planet in the population." Jupiter scores an assist Dasgupta and his colleagues combined lab experiments and computer simulations to map the proportions of nitrogen and phosphorus, two chemical elements essential to life, in the early solar system. …