Senior Science Journalist
NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona
The chemical building blocks of life have been found in the grainy dust of an asteroid called Bennu, an analysis reveals.
Samples of the space rock, which were scooped up by a Nasa spacecraft and brought to Earth, contain a rich array of minerals and thousands of organic compounds.
These include amino acids, which are the molecules that make up proteins, as well as nucleobases – the fundamental components of DNA.
This doesn’t mean there was ever life on Bennu, but it supports the theory that asteroids delivered these vital ingredients to Earth when they crashed into our planet billions of years ago.
Scientists think those same compounds could also have been brought to other worlds in our Solar System.
“What we’ve learned from it is amazing,” said Prof Sara Russell, a cosmic mineralogist from the Natural History Museum in London.
“It’s telling us about our own origins, and it enables us to answer these really, really big questions about where life began. And who doesn’t want to know about how life started?”
The findings are published in two papers in the journal Nature.