Asteroid Bennu: RNA Building Blocks Found – Origins of Life Hypothesis Strengthened
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Sugars and the Building Blocks of Life Found on Asteroid Bennu
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Asteroid Bennu continues to provide us with invaluable clues about how the early Solar System formed and the origin of life.After analyzing in greater depth the samples brought to Earth by the space probe OSIRIS-REx from NASA in 2023, a research team led by Tohoku University in Japan has just added essential sugars, such as ribose, to the list of ingredients crucial to the creation of life as we know it. The study was recently published in Nature Geoscience.
Asteroid Bennu
In 2020, the mission OSIRIS-REx NASA successfully collected around one hundred grams of material from the asteroid Bennu, which orbits the Sun hundreds of millions of kilometers away, between Mars and Jupiter, and brought them to earth uncontaminated in 2023. Since then, these samples have been distributed to various laboratories around the world for examination. Thanks to this collective effort, we now know that samples from the asteroid Bennu contain phosphates, many of the amino acids that make up proteins as we certainly know them, and the five nitrogenous bases that make up DNA and RNA molecules. Additionally, eleven other minerals were found that were likely part of an environment rich in brine, a type of “brine” produced by the evaporation of water.
The New Ingredients Discovered in Bennu
Analyzing by ‘gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry’ a sample previously crushed and mixed with water and acid, the research team discovered additional ingredients: ribose