New research announced by NASA on Tuesday details a bevy of exciting discoveries from asteroid dust that could provide clues to how life developed in our neck of the cosmos, including the sugars required for basic life forms, a mysterious gum-like substance and a surprising amount of stardust from supernovae.
NASA's robot spacecraft, Osiris-Rex, scooped up rocks and dust from the asteroid Bennu in 2020 and delivered the sample to Earth in 2023. Since then, scientists around the globe have been studying the space rocks to gain insight into the early days of our solar system.
Yoshihiro Furukawa, a scientist from Tohoku University in Japan, led a team that found the sugar. It's the first time scientists have discovered six-carbon glucose -- a universal source of carbon and fuel for life forms -- in an extraterrestrial sample. Five-carbon sugar ribose was also present in the samples, but this type of sugar has previously been found in space.
"Although these sugars are not evidence of life, their detection, along with previous detections of amino acids, nucleobases and carboxylic acids in Bennu samples, show building blocks of biological molecules were widespread throughout the solar system," the NASA release states.
Don't miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.
Furukawa said in a statement that all of the nucleobases needed to build DNA and RNA have already been found in the Bennu samples, so "the new discovery of ribose means that all of the components to form the molecule RNA are present in Bennu."
The findings were published in Nature on Tuesday, and the researchers say their work supports a hypothesis called RNA World. The hypothesis relates to the origins of life on our planet. It states that before complex life existed on Earth, there was an RNA world that predated the development of modern cells.
Enlarge Image Bio-essential sugars were discovered by US and Japanese scientists in samples from the asteroid Bennu. NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Dan Gallagher
Ancient 'space gum' and supernovae dust
Aside from life-building sugars, the Bennu sample holds a few other interesting findings. A pair of researchers named Scott Sandford (from NASA's Ames Research Center) and Zack Gainsforth (from the University of California, Berkeley) also released a paper in Nature on Tuesday about a "gum-like" material that's never been found on space rocks before now.
... continue reading