Not sure why this confirms comets delivered life to Earth. Comets are made up of the same components as the rest of the solar system. Those building block could have already been on Earth during planet formation. as the entie solar sytem coalesed from dust particles.

Mycroft, good point, but the real question is...given that those compound could have already been on Earth, would they have survived earth earliest stages of a molten crust and seas of lava? Perhaps they never reformed after that and it did in fact take comets or asteroids to bring the life causing compounds to a Earth that was more able to receive them. You might both be right, NASA, and Mycroft.

Lets think logically... "such amino acids are made by mixing organic carbon-containing compounds with water..."

Lets dissect to be clear, when you hyphenate the way the author did that means COMPOUNDS containing ORGANIC CARBON.

Where did the organic carbon come from? Lets assume that some isotopes of carbon (upon creating within the heart of a star) are naturally "organic." And that life and organic are not necessarily synonymous or preclusive in that LIFE must exist for a carbon molecule to be considered "organic."

Even still, comets don't necessarily form on their own. After a solar system forms, what is left over clumps up into smaller bodies, not sure if a comet necessarily forms parallel to a planet. Even IF comets form on their own it is just as likely that the organic carbon molecules found their way onto the more massive planets as it did onto the tiny comets. Which means, life wasn't necessarily delivered to the planet on the back of a comet.

You may argue, well, any organic carbons wouldn't survive the extreme temperatures of planet formation and the vulcanism that prevailed across Earth in particular.

If organic carbons are so solely because of their isotope and not necessarily of "life" in origin then they, as any other molecule, could have survived planet formation. Why do these "smart" scientists try to make things so much more complicated and fantastical than they need be?

Amino acids can be found in lage quantities in a variety of places in outer space, comets are just one of them. Basically, amino acids develop wherever enough infra red light is, while at the same time, uv light and radiation levels are low. one example would be dust clouds around newborn stars. these findings caused the theory that carbon based life happens whenever nothing much is done against it.

@For real.
You should have attended your science lectures. The author merely used redundant terminology, to "dumb down" the article.

Organic chemicals always contain carbon. But not all carbon containing chemicals are organic. And organic in this case is a chemical descriptor. You cannot have organic carbon, unless you mean that the carbon is currently contained in an organic chemical.