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Ingredients for life found in space rocks that
fell to Earth |
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January 26, 2018 |
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By Eleanor Imster
EarthSky.org
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| A blue
crystal recovered from a meteorite that
fell near Morocco in 1998. The scale bar
represents 200 microns (millionths of a
meter). Image via Berkeley Lab |
Two space rocks, which separately crashed to
Earth in 1998 after spending billions of years
in our solar system’s asteroid belt, share
something in common: the ingredients for life.
That’s according to a study published January 10
in the journal Science Advances.
The study scientists analyzed the chemical
makeup within tiny blue and purple salt crystals
sampled from these meteorites.
They said that the two meteorites are the first
ever found to contain a mix of complex organic
compounds such as hydrocarbons and amino acids,
as well as microscopic traces of liquid water
believed to date back to the infancy of our
solar system – about 4.5 billion years ago.
The researchers also found evidence for the
pair’s past intermingling and likely parents –
including Ceres, a dwarf planet that’s the
largest object in the asteroid belt, and the
asteroid Hebe, a major source of meteorites that
fall on Earth.
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| Dr. Queenie
Hoi Shan Chan with a Raman spectrometer,
one of the instruments used in the
study. |
Dr. Queenie Chan is a planetary scientist and
postdoctoral research associate at The Open
University in the U.K. and the study’s lead
author. Chan said in a statement:
"This is really the first time we have found
abundant organic matter also associated with
liquid water that is really crucial to the
origin of life and the origin of complex organic
compounds in space," Chan said in a statement.
"We’re looking at the organic ingredients that
can lead to the origin of life including the
amino acids needed to form proteins."
Chan said the similarity of the crystals found
in the meteorites – one of which smashed into
the ground near a children’s basketball game in
Texas in March 1998 and the other which hit near
Morocco in August 1998 – suggest that their
asteroid hosts may have crossed paths and mixed
materials.
There are also structural clues of an impact –
perhaps by a small asteroid fragment impacting a
larger asteroid, Chan said, which opens up many
possibilities for how organic matter may be
passed from one host to another in space.
There are also clues, Chan said, based on the
organic chemistry and space observations, that
the crystals may have originally been seeded by
ice- or water-spewing volcanic activity on
Ceres.
Everything leads to the conclusion that the
origin of life is really possible elsewhere.
There is a great range of organic compounds
within these meteorites, including a very
primitive type of organics that likely represent
the early solar system’s organic composition. |
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