☄️ Bennu sample hints life's ingredients formed in different corners of space
Scientists compared an amino acid from asteroid Bennu with the same molecule from a famous meteorite and found clues that they formed in different conditions.
The mystery
Bits of asteroid brought back to Earth contain some of the chemical building blocks used by living things. But where in the young Solar System did those molecules actually form?
The answer
NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft delivered rock and dust from asteroid Bennu in 2023. Earlier studies identified 14 amino acids from the set of 20 that Earth's living things use to build proteins, plus four of the building blocks of DNA and RNA. In new work published in Nature Communications Earth and Environment, a team led by Ophélie Mcintosh, formerly of Penn State, studied one molecule, beta-alanine, from Bennu and from the Murchison meteorite. Using new methods, they measured not only the overall isotopes in each sample but differences between individual atoms inside the same molecule. The results suggest the same kind of molecule formed under different conditions and in different places in the disk of gas and dust around the early Sun. Penn State geoscientist Katherine Freeman said she was stunned by how large the difference was between two neighbouring atoms.
Now think about this
If life's ingredients are common on asteroids, how likely is it that life exists elsewhere in the galaxy?
