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New search Announced by NASA Tuesday details a host of exciting discoveries from asteroid dust that could provide clues about how life evolved in the universe, including sugars needed for basic life forms, a mysterious glue-like substance, and a surprising amount of stardust from supernovas.
NASA’s robotic spacecraft, Osiris-Rex, Rocks and dust were swept away from the asteroid Bennu In 2020 and Deliver the sample to Earth in 2023. Since then, scientists around the world have studied space rocks to gain insight into the early days of our solar system.
Yoshihiro Furukawa, a scientist from Tohoku University in Japan, led the team that discovered sugar. It is the first time scientists have detected six-carbon glucose – a global source of carbon and fuel for life – in an extraterrestrial sample. The five-carbon ribose sugar was also present in the samples, but this type of sugar is also present They were previously found in space.
“Although these sugars are not evidence of life, their discovery, along with previous discoveries of amino acids, nucleic bases and carboxylic acids in Bennu samples, shows that the building blocks of biological molecules were widespread throughout the solar system,” NASA said in a statement.
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Furukawa said in a statement that all the nucleobases needed to build DNA and RNA were already found in Bennu’s samples, so “the new discovery of ribose means that all the components that make up the RNA molecule are present in Bennu.”
And the results were Published in Nature on Tuesday, and researchers say their work supports a hypothesis called RNA World. Hypothesis It concerns the origin of life on our planet. It states that before complex life existed on Earth, there was a world of ribonucleic acid (RNA) that preceded the development of modern cells.
American and Japanese scientists have discovered essential vital sugars in samples from the asteroid Bennu.
Ancient “space gum” and supernova dust
Aside from the sugars that help build life, Bennu’s sample holds some other interesting findings. A pair of researchers named Scott Sandford (of NASA Ames Research Center) and Zach Gainsforth (of the University of California, Berkeley) also issued a paper In the journal Nature on Tuesday about a “gum-like” substance that has never been found in space rocks before now.
The researchers say that the material was originally soft and flexible, but became hardened over time. Space gum is made of “polymer-like materials extremely rich in nitrogen and oxygen.” NASA says this is an important development, because it may contain some of the “chemical precursors” that helped start life on our planet.
“With this strange material, we are looking at, most likely, one of the oldest modifications of materials to have occurred in this rock,” Sandford said in a statement. “In this primordial asteroid that formed in the early days of the solar system, we are looking at events close to the beginning.”
Rather, a third paper Writing in Nature on Tuesday, a research team led by Anh Nguyen (NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston) investigated dust in Bennu samples that came from stars older than our solar system. There was a lot more supernova dust than expected.
The samples contained six times more stardust than scientists have found in any other astronomical material.
“Their preservation in the Bennu samples was a surprise and demonstrates that some materials survived alteration in the original body,” Nguyen said in a statement. “Our study reveals the diversity of pre-solar materials that the mother accumulated during her formation.”
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center provided overall mission management Osiris Rex.