Astronomers now believe that powerful solar storms sparked life on Earth some four billion years ago, when the young sun possessed higher energies to trigger life on the planet.

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NASA scientists say that juvenile stars can become extremely violent and the young sun was a prime example of this. Around four billion years ago, the sun's surface was bubbling with powerful eruptions, emitting charged particle clouds of solar material and radiation into deep space.

When these solar storms crashed into the planet known as super flares, they pierced through the planet's protective magnetic field known as the magnetosphere, which has been in a weaker state during that period.

When these active solar particles mixed with the nitrogen in the Earth's atmosphere, this created a greenhouse effect that trapped heat and therefore brewed chemical conditions for life to proliferate.

Scientists believed that almost four billion years ago, the sun's heat was only 70 percent of how it is today, contributing to the "faint young star paradox". This paradox describes how the evidence of liquid water and the weaker solar power that has been shining on Earth that time, was contradictory, as this lesser amount of heat could not have possibly produced the right conditions to create flowing water.

According to lead author of the study, Vladimir Airapetian from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, during that time, the planet only received 70 percent of solar energy from the sun compared to today. This would mean that the planet would be covered in ice, instead, geological evidence shows that Earth was filled with warm liquid water, where this is considered as a Faint Young Sun Paradox. Now, this new study shows how solar storms are crucial in warming the infant Earth. 

Massive solar storms only occur around once every 100 years or less but data obtained from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope reveals how young stars can produce as many as 10 super flares in a single day. During that time, the sun was considered to be an infant star, where Earth's atmosphere was composed of 90 percent nitrogen, which is 12 percent more than current levels.

In this new study, the active particles that were released by the sun collided into these nitrogen molecules, breaking them down into nitrogen atoms, then colliding with carbon dioxide that produced carbon monoxide and oxygen.

Airapetian explains that these particles that travelled via space weather and slammed into the Earth's magnetosphere, crashed with abundant nitrogen in the atmosphere, that changed the chemistry of the atmosphere completely, which made life entirely possible on Earth.

This new study is published in the journal Nature Geoscience. 

Tagssolar storms, solar flares, life on earth, Sun, Earth, evolution of life on Earth, faint young star paradox