The samples of rock and dust brought from the Bennu Asteroidclose to Earth, they contain organic matter, including amino acids and the five nitrogen bases of DNA and RNA, as well as salts that were formed at the beginning of the history of the body that gave rise to this rock. That is, the basic ingredients of life.
In 2018, the Osiris-Rex mission He reached this asteroid near Earth to collect pristine samples, intact by alterations induced by the Earth’s atmosphere, and brought them back to our planet in September 2023 to be analyzed. In total, Osiris-Rex collected around 120 grams of material, twice the amount required for the mission. The valuable samples were divided and lent themselves to researchers around the world for analysis, which is revealed, a year and a half later, in two articles published Wednesday in the magazines Nature and Nature Astronomy.
In the article of Nature Astronomy, Daniel Glavin and his team report the finding of thousands of organic molecular compounds. Among them, 14 of the 20 protein amino acids present in the life forms of the earth, 19 rare or absent non -protein amino acids in known biology and the five biological nucleobases (adenine, guanine, cytosine, timina and uracil).
They have also obtained evidence that Bennu was rich in compounds that contain nitrogen and ammonia, which were formed billions of years ago in cold and distant regions of our solar system, which offers new knowledge about the chemistry of that primitive moment. The authors conclude that Bennu has a much richer complexity in organic matter than terrestrial biology and suggests that their original body may have come from the external solar system, where ammonia and volatile ice are stable.
Extraterrestrial salmueras
In the article of Nature, Timothy McCoy And his colleagues have found a variety of salt minerals, including phosphates with sodium and carbonates, sulfates, chlorides and rich sodium fluorides. These salts may have been formed during the evaporation of the brine that existed at the beginning of the history of Bennu’s parent body, indicating that there was once water. The possible presence of water, together with Nucleobases, raises questions about the potential for prebiotic organic synthesis (the process that creates the basic components of life), which will require more research, according to the authors.
Now we know that the basic ingredients of life were combined in really interesting and complex ways in Bennu’s progenitor body
Timothy McCoy
– Researcher at the Smithsonian Institute and main author of one of the articles
“Now we know that the basic ingredients of life were combined in really interesting and complex ways in Bennu’s progenitor body,” says McCoy. “We have discovered the next step on the road to life.” Researchers postulate that there are probably still similar salmueras in other extraterrestrial bodies, including the Dwarf Ceres and the Holden, Enced Moon, where spacecraft have detected sodium carbonate.
Evolution from nitrogen
For Olga Prieto-Ballesterosresearcher at the Astrobiology Center (CAB INTA-CSIC), the result of Glavin attracts more attention than McCoy’s, because the organic chemistry of the Bennu asteroid following the nitrogen trace of rich fluids in ammonia. “Nitrogen is a basic chemical element so that life as we know it is developed, and that under the conditions of Bennu, has reacted to form thousands of different chemical species, including amino acids,” he says. “The characterization of the aqueous fluids rich in salts is also of extreme importance to know the processes that have affected the original prebiotic matter of our solar system.”
In the conditions of Bennu’s history, nitrogen has reacted to form thousands of different chemical species, including amino acids
Olga Prieto-Ballesteros
– Researcher at the Astrobiology Center (CAB INTA-CSIC)
For Juan Luis Rizosresearcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) that works in this same field, the discovery of Salmina is especially interesting, which has also been found in other bodies such as Encela, one of Saturn’s moons. “When these salmueras evaporate and the water leaves, the minerals that are formed solid crystals,” he explains. “If you find these crystals you can use them to infer the geological history that has followed that object in which there was a brine in its day, and this is precisely what has been found in Bennu.”
In the opinion of curls, this and other asteroids are “a kind of natural laboratories” that allow us to study how water-roca interactions and evaporation processes could hypothetically facilitate the formation of prebiotic compounds and better understand the origin of life.
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