For the first time, scientists have found the building blocks for life on an asteroid in space.
Japanese researchers have discovered more than 20 amino acids on the Ryugu space rock, which is more than 200 million miles from Earth.
Scientists made the first survey of its kind by studying samples recovered from nearby Earth asteroid from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) spacecraft Hayabusa2, which landed on Ryugu in 2018. In 2019, the spacecraft collected 0.2 ounces (5.4 grams) from the asteroid’s surface and subsurface. placed it in an airtight container and tossed it back up Land on a calibrated trajectory.
Related: We may finally know why the spinning asteroid Ryugu has such a strange shape
Rather than being a large boulder, Ryugu is made up of many small rocks, and the asteroid got its unusual, rapidly spinning top shape, scientists believe. As a carbonaceousor type C, asteroid, Ryugu contains a large amount of carbon-rich organic it mattersmost of which probably originated from the same nebula that gave birth to the Sun and the planets of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Previous analyzes of the sample have also suggested that the asteroid harbors water.
“The Ryugu material is the most primitive solar system material we have ever studied,” said Hisayoshi Yurimoto, professor of geoscience at the University of Hokkaido and leader of the Hayabusa2 mission’s initial chemical analysis team, outlining initial findings at Lunar and Planetary Scientific Conference in March.
Unlike organic molecules found on Earth, the pitch-black asteroid samples, which scientists discovered reflect only 2% to 3% of the light that hits them, have not been modified by interactions with the Earth’s environment, giving their chemical composition is much closer to that of the early solar system.
“We detected various prebiotic organic compounds in the samples, including proteinogenic amino acids, earth oil-like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and various nitrogenous compounds,” Hiroshi Naraoka, a planetary scientist at Kyushu University and leader of the team that looked for organic matter in the samples, he said at the conference. “These prebiotic organic molecules can spread throughout the solar system, potentially as interplanetary dust from Ruygu’s surface by impact or other causes.”
Initially, the sample analysis detected 10 types of amino acids, but now the number has risen to over 20, according to the Japanese Ministry of Education. Amino acids are the basic building blocks of all proteins and are indispensable prerequisites for the existence of life on our planet. A 2019 study in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta found organic molecules from space in a 3.3-billion-year-old group of rocks discovered in South Africa, raising the possibility that some, if not all, of these life-building molecules first arrived on Earth on comets and asteroids. Ryugu’s findings make evidence that asteroids carry these molecules even stronger.
“Demonstrating that amino acids exist in the subsoil of asteroids increases the likelihood of compounds arriving on Earth from space,” Kensei Kobayashi, emeritus professor of astrobiology at Yokohama National University, told Kyodo News. This means that amino acids could likely be found on other natural planets and satellites, a clue that “life may have originated in more places in the universe than previously thought,” he added.
Researchers are continuing to analyze Ryugu’s samples and more data on the asteroid’s formation and composition will soon be available.
And Ryugu isn’t the only space rock under investigation. In 2021, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected a rock sample from another diamond-shaped asteroid, called Bennu. When the sample returns to Earth in 2023, the organic matter signs it contains could provide scientists with important clues about the evolution of the solar system and its materials, as well as how life emerged from it.
Originally published in Live Science.