The building blocks for organic matter have been discovered on the asteroid Bennu, as deatiled in a new study in the journal Nature Astronomy. The research gives new insight into how life originated on Earth and where we might find it elsewhere in the universe.
“Organic matter in meteorites reveals clues about early Solar System chemistry and the origin of molecules important to life,” the authors write, adding that samples from asteroids found on Earth are often contaminated by exposure to our planet. To avoid having this happen with materials acquired from asteroids in space, scientists from Kyushu University in Japan carefully analyzed their samples acquired from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. That mission brought 121.6 grams from the asteroid Bennu to Earth after collecting it in September 2023.
“Here we show that Bennu samples are volatile rich, with more carbon, nitrogen and ammonia than samples from asteroid Ryugu and most meteorites,” the scientists write. Importantly they also discovered all five nitrogenous bases — adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine, and uracil — that are necessary to build DNA and RNA. Finally they found traces of important organic compounds like xanthine, hypoxanthine, and nicotinic acid (vitamin B3).
In addition to suggesting that life could exist elsewhere in the universe, the molecules found on Bennu raise provocative questions about the origins of life on Earth. Some scientists theorize that Earth-bound life was created because an outer space object like Bennu collided with our world. Indeed, scientists say there is a remote possibility of Bennu impacting Earth in the distant future: There is a 0.037 percent chance it will hit Earth in 2182, as well as a 1 out of 1,750 chance it will hit Earth by 2300.
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