Asteroid impacts may hold the answer to a question that has plagued scientists and researchers for centuries. Scientists recently discovered that asteroid and comet impacts can transform a relatively simple and abundant chemical into the building blocks of life. The report is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In a new study, scientists announce crucial findings that smear the lines between two previously held theories, that the origins of life arrived following a ride on a comet or asteroid, or that it arose spontaneously following the introduction of organic molecules. The team of scientists involved in the study was led by Svatopluk Civiš, a chemist at the Central European Institute of Technology in the Czech Republic.

The researchers uncovered this finding by using formamide and a collision from an asteroid. This molecule is found in copious amounts throughout the universe and is constructed from the four basic atoms as human DNA. While scientists have previously known that it is possible to use formamide to turn into base-like pairs, the spontaneous high energy production of base pairs is a novel discovery.

Raffaele Saladino, an expert in pre-life chemistry at Tuscia University in Italy, who was not involved in this latest research, said in a statement, “It’s an incredibly interesting concept. We normally think of objects like comets as potential carriers of these constituent pieces required for life—not something that’s helping synthesize them.”

According to the National Institutes of Health, the information in DNA is stored as a code made up of four chemical bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T).