Life components are found in samples by asteroid Bennu

Liquid underground pools probably formed 4.6 billion years ago in the parent body of the Bennu asteroid and contain the building blocks of life, but not living creatures.

This is the new chemical analysis of the samples that NASA’s Osiris-Rex mission grabbed from the spatial rock approximately 500 meters in 2020 and returned to Earth three years later. The findings suggest that not all potentially habitable environments continue to develop life, reporters report in two published works 29 January Nature AND Astronomy of nature.

Plastic scientists study asteroids and comets because they offer a brief presentation of the intact conditions present in the early solar system. “Likes how to try to understand what is a thanksgiving dinner by seeing the remaining scraps in the trash pile,” says astrobiologist Jason Dworkin, the Osiris-Rex project scientist at the Greenbelt Greenbel Spatial Flight Center, MD . “You can see and see and see: ‘Oh, there are few peaks of carrot. There must have been used carrots somewhere.'”

In this case, investigations of the spatial rock composting pile provided organic compounds, including the five nucleic acids that make up DNA and RNA and 14 of the 20 amino acids that cells use to make proteins, along with 19 other amino acids used by things living. There were also a number of saline minerals that would have been formed like slowly evaporated water, similar to those found around the dry beds of lakes in the ground.

Bennu, who orbits mainly between Earth and Mars, was divided between 700 million and 2 billion years ago by a larger body, an ancient relic of the dawn of the solar system formed somewhere outside the Saturn orbit. The demolition of the radioactive elements present in that early body would have produced heat, melting water inside the facility and creating room temperature pools that could have been several meters deep and continuous for several thousand years.

While such warm wet ponds seem to have contained biochemical precursors for life, these pools do not seem to have continued in the stage of life. Many organic molecules come in two versions of each other’s mirror image. Living things on Earth almost exclusively use leftist versions, while Bennu sample contains right and left nucleic versions and amino acids in equal quantities.

Some possible explanations are that the brine pools did not last enough, or that they had the wrong temperature or pH, or perhaps Bennu lacked an atmosphere, says DWorkin.