back to article And now something fun for a change: Building blocks of life in Bennu asteroid samples

Scientists analyzing samples from asteroid Bennu have found something remarkable: Despite being a cold, lifeless rubble pile that formed around 65 million years ago, it holds a rich inventory of organic molecules - key ingredients for life. Returned to Earth by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in late 2023 - and sealed inside its …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fun? Challenge accepted.

    Maybe if it crashed into the earth it'd wipe out the life here that's made such an utter fuck up of the planet and seed new life that gets it right?

    1. Philo T Farnsworth Silver badge

      Re: Fun? Challenge accepted.

      This is completely uninformed speculation but given that Bennu is 65 million years ago I got to wonder whether it might be composed of ejecta from the Chicxulub impact some also 65 million years ago.

      Unlikely, I suppose, but it would explain the biological signatures that, as far as I'm aware, haven't yet been found elsewhere.

      Can someone with a bit of domain knowledge help me out here? "No way" is a perfectly acceptable answer.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: Fun? Challenge accepted.

        I'll admit that thought of these indicators being ground-up and spat out dinosaur bits crossed my mind, too, but after the moment of amusing fantasy, sadly it's not likely. The over-all composition isn't correct for ejecta from Earth.

      2. petef

        Re: Fun? Challenge accepted.

        I'll bite, no way.

        The chemicals analysed from Bennu were racemic. If they had originated from Earth, either ejecta or contamination of these experiments, then the enantiomers would be unbalanced. Most of the essential amino acids of (Earth) life are laevorotatory.

        I'm not seeking to bamboozle, rather leaving it to the reader to follow up on the technical terms. Chirality is important and simple in some respects but often overlooked.

        1. Philo T Farnsworth Silver badge

          Re: Fun? Challenge accepted.

          Thanx.

          It was fun while it lasted.

      3. Spherical Cow Silver badge

        Re: Fun? Challenge accepted.

        "The material that makes up Bennu... ...never melted and differentiated"

        That alone rules out ejecta from Earth. Your suggestion was still fun though.

    2. BartyFartsLast Silver badge

      Re: Fun? Challenge accepted.

      Seems like it might happen, there's a roughly 1% chance a 100m asteroid might hit earth in 2032. Now I'm wondering if we can shorten those odds and accelerate Elmo's Mars plan to get him off this planet sooner

    3. frankvw

      Re: Fun? Challenge accepted.

      "Maybe if it crashed into the earth it'd wipe out the life here that's made such an utter fuck up of the planet and seed new life that gets it right?"

      Ehm... No. An impact potent enough to "wipe out life" on earth (from your phrasing I must conclude that you mean the entire planet will be sterilized) would not only have be so kinetically energetic that it could break the Earth apart, but it would also liberate so much heat that any organic matter contained in the foreign body would be completely destroyed.

  2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "all five nucleobases that form DNA and RNA"

    Good to see that being reported. I read a report in another place that ignored uracil which is arguably more important than thiamine. It's RNA which is at the business end of protein synthesis with DNA coming late to the party.

    "one of the mysteries of the Bennu samples lies in the chirality of the amino acids they contain. Terrestrial life relies almost entirely on left-handed amino acids, but those found in Bennu exhibit no such bias"

    I'd have thought it was entirely to be expected.

    1. jake Silver badge
      Pint

      One interesting question is what happened to all those early Earthly lifeforms that were based on right-handed aminos?

      My guess is that they were tastier.

      Beer, just to wash 'em down.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Aliens!

    See title

  4. xanadu42

    Given "that Bennu contains 14 of the 20 amino acids essential for life on Earth"...

    And Assuming that Bennu is a typical example...

    Does this mean that there is at least a 70% chance that lifeforms on Goldilocks Zone Exoplanets will have a similar biology to here on Earth?

    If so it means we are not alone :)

    Unfortunately, given our current tech, we will not be able to find out for millions, or billions, of our years

    1. TVU

      If you have a space telescope that is double the diameter of the current James Webb Space Telescope that gives 4x the light gathering power then that should really start to pick up life bearing oxygen-water worlds even if they are just at the microbial stage of evolutionary development.

    2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      We are not alone

      We can't be. The Hubble Deep Fields experiment proves that, whatever point in the sky you look at, there's a galaxy somewhere out there.

      A galaxy. Millions upon millions of star systems. And we now know that most stars have planets.

      There is life out there. It's just that there is a vanishingly small chance that we ever communicate with it, let alone meet it.

    3. HorseflySteve

      We may not have to wait that long if there are lifeforms that are sufficiently advanced to generate the detectably organized EM signals that SETI has been looking for for decades.

      That they haven't yet found any suggests that either there are no such advanced lifeforms within 50 lightyears or so, or they're using frequencies that we can't or don't detect.

  5. Bebu sa Ware
    Windows

    Life...

    It would appear that you will get nucleotides and amino acids forming in quite challenging environments with possibly a smidgen of water as a prerequisite. These conditions must exist over most of the Universe and unless the step from these precursors to even the most primatitive life forms is impossibly unlikely it would follow that the Universe is teeming with life even if we restricted ourselves to life based on nucleic and amino acids.

    If we find evidence of life on Mars either now or in the distant past I think we might have some confidence that the emergence of life is not impossibly unlikely.

    I find this thought an ember of optimism in these pessimistic times.

  6. Apocalypso - a cheery end to the world
    Coat

    The samples also included ammonia and formaldehyde

    > The samples also included ammonia and formaldehyde...

    Organic chemists' Christmas cracker joke:

    Q: What do you call the main precursor to formaldehyde?

    A: Formaldejekyll.

    [Lab coat. Gone]

    1. Ochib

      Re: The samples also included ammonia and formaldehyde

      The opposite of formaldehyde is casualdejekyll

  7. Roger Kynaston
    Pint

    fun is right

    Lots of these -> for the Nasa boffins.

    I do hope that robotic missions don't get de-prioritised in the coming years.

  8. James Wilson

    I misunderstood

    I wasn't paying enough attention, when I read "a cold, lifeless rubble pile" I assumed they were talking about Basingstoke.

    1. seven of five Silver badge

      Re: I misunderstood

      or my marriage

  9. DS999 Silver badge
    Black Helicopters

    Formed 65 million years ago?

    So the dinosaurs escaped before the asteroid hit and left some of their DNA behind!

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