Erwin Schrödinger pondered how life maintains order despite the second law of thermodynamics. He could never have imagined that part of the answer lies hidden in the instability of giant stars. The experiments of Chien-Shiung Wu proved: the weak interaction violates mirror symmetry. And Fritz Zwicky was the first to realize that supernovae eject not only heavy elements but also unimaginable showers of neutrinos. It is these nearly elusive particles, according to a new model, that became the conductor, waving an invisible baton over prebiological chaos, forcing molecules to choose one of two mirror forms.

In cold interstellar clouds, cosmic cradles, countless organic precursors float. Under normal conditions, their left-handed and right-handed isomers are born in equal amounts: mirror symmetry is unbreakable. But when a supernova erupts nearby, a stream of neutrinos pierces through cosmic dust and ices. The weak interaction, described by the Standard Model, creates a minuscule energy difference between enantiomers — the so-called PVED shift, on the order of $10^{-22}$ eV. This almost magical nudge sets off a chain of autocatalytic reactions: the product accelerates its own production, and stochastic fluctuations blow the microscopic imbalance up to a macroscopic enantiomeric excess.

The authors of the model reproduced this process in numerical simulation, solving the Fokker–Planck equation for the evolution of chiral imbalance. The key turned out to be the temperature regime: between 165 and 185 K, under conditions typical of molecular clouds, the system reaches an excess of over 10% within 300 million years. At lower temperatures, kinetics freeze; at higher ones, racemization erases the asymmetry. This narrow corridor, like the neck of a cosmic hourglass, aligns perfectly with geological evidence and analysis of meteorites, where spectroscopy has already detected chiral molecules such as propylene oxide.

Thus the death of a massive star burgeons into the essence of life. If supernovae scatter across the Galaxy not only carbon and nitrogen but also chirally purified raw material, then perhaps all biochemistry in the Universe uses one direction of twist. This is not mere speculation: future experiments with reactor neutrinos and asteroid analysis will test the model in laboratories. Perhaps we stand on the threshold of unraveling the “symmetry breaking” that separated the living from the non-living. And then our mirror twins would not be a fantasy but merely a question of galactic evolution. What if, in other corners of space where the neutrino wind blew differently, life chose the right-handed side, and would become a deadly poison to us?