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Science|Lurking Inside an Asteroid: Life’s Ingredients
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/science/nasa-bennu-asteroid-molecules.html
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Origins
Scientists studying samples that NASA collected from the asteroid Bennu found a wide assortment of organic molecules that shed light on how life arose.
By Carl Zimmer
Carl Zimmer has reported on the origin of life and is the author of “Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to be Alive.”
Jan. 29, 2025, 11:00 a.m. ET
Our solar system contains planets, dwarf planets, asteroids and comets — but only one world is known to harbor life. Scientists have long debated whether Earth is truly unique. Perhaps our planet just happened to have the right combination of ingredients, conditions and timing to allow life to emerge.
But a pinch of grit from a distant asteroid collected by a NASA spacecraft holds hints that our planet may not be so special. A team of researchers reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday that the asteroid, known as Bennu, contains a wealth of organic molecules, including many crucial building blocks of life. The chemistry that produced them might be going on today on the ice moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
“Our odds of finding life elsewhere are increasing,” said Daniel Glavin, a senior scientist for sample return at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a co-author of the two papers.
In 2016, NASA launched OSIRIS-REx, a robotic probe, to Bennu in order to gather clues to the birth of the solar system. Some 4.5 billion years ago, our solar neighborhood started as a cloud of dust and ice. Planets gradually emerged from the cloud, each developing down a different path in the billions of years that followed. Jupiter became a gas giant, for example, while Venus ended up with a rocky, scorched landscape.
But some of the primordial rubble continued to orbit the sun, becoming today’s asteroids. For decades, scientists were able to study asteroids only when a fragment has fallen to Earth as a meteorite. One of the most important of these landed in 1969 near the town of Murchison in Australia. Researchers who inspected it were surprised to find amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. (Our cells use 20 amino acids to make thousands of proteins.)
The discovery raised the possibility that objects from space might have delivered amino acids and other ingredients for life to early Earth. Chemical reactions might have taken place in ponds or deep-sea vents to turn these compounds into the first cells.
