Violent young Sun may have seeded life on Earth–study

For the past decade, tens of thousands of sun worshipers and party people from all over the archipelago have been trooping to southern Mindanao for the Sarangani Bay (SarBay) Festival, seen as “biggest” beach party in the country.

This long stretch of white in Gumasa Beach in Glan will sizzle once more on June 3-5, 2016 for the event's 10th installment, but with a unique twist.

Sarangani Provincial Tourism Council president Michelle LopezSolon revealed that this year’s edition will be more than the usual beach.

Themed #SarBayEvolution, this year's version will celebrate the innovations it has embraced through the years, most notably its advocacy for environmental sustainability.

She said the third day of SarBay will be devoted to coastal clean-up activities, educational programs and environmental projects such as mangrove and tree-planting.

Five non-government organizations are joining the "I Love Clean SarBay" program this year to help maintain the ecological balance of the Bay’s coastal ecosystem.

She added that this year’s SarBay Fest aims to surpass last year which attracted about 126,000 guests.

This is the first time that it will be held in June to adopt to the new academic calendar of collegiate students, and serve as summer's last hurrah.

Once a best-kept tourist secret, Gumasa has become one of the country's most sought-after getaway because of its unspoiled talcum-like sand, minus the madding crowd of popular beaches.

A Best Tourism Event Awardee from the Association of Tourism Officers in the Philippines for several years now, SarBay Fest is organized by the Provincial Tourism Council and supported by the Provincial Government, the Department of Tourism Region 12 and the Municipality of Glan.

PARIS (AFP) – Life on Earth may have sprung from bombardment by a youthful Sun lashing out with flares as potent as a thousand trillion exploding atomic bombs, a study suggested on Monday.

Such violence may explain how Earth became hospitable to life about four billion years ago, when the planet, and its star, were much, much colder, a research team wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience.

While the Sun was about a third fainter than it is today, it was likely much more tempestuous, they found.

Repeated super-flares would have smashed nitrogen (N2) molecules in the atmosphere to yield a planet-warming greenhouse gas called nitrous oxide (N2O or “laughing gas”), as well as hydrogen cyanide, which produces amino acids – the building blocks of proteins.

While it is essential for all life, nitrogen in the form it would have existed in a young Earth's atmosphere is not chemically reactive, and needs to be transformed into more accessible forms.

Very high temperatures can achieve this.

The study was based on telescopic observations of other stars resembling our Sun in the first few hundred million years of life, as well as models of the chemistry of early Earth's atmosphere.

Without an efficient greenhouse gas to trap the Sun's heat, “Earth would be a snowball rather than a wet and warm planet supporting life four billion years ago,” study co-author Vladimir Airapetian explained.

The new model “resolves the currently unresolved 'Faint Young Sun' paradox by efficient production of laughing gas in the lower Earth's atmosphere” at the time.