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The black particles from an asteroid some 300 million kilometers away look unremarkable, but they hold components of life.
All the essential ingredients to make the DNA and RNA underpinning life on Earth have been discovered in samples collected from the asteroid Ryugu, scientists said Monday.
The discovery comes after these building blocks of life were detected on another asteroid called Bennu, suggesting they are abundant throughout the solar system.
One longstanding theory is that life first began on Earth when asteroids carrying fundamental elements crashed into our planet long ago.
The asteroids that hurtle through our solar system give scientists a rare chance to study this possibility.
In 2014, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2 blasted off on a 300-million-kilometer (185-million-mile) mission to land on Ryugu, a 900-meter-wide (2,950-feet-wide) asteroid.
It successfully managed to collect two samples of rocks weighing 5.4 grams (under a fifth of an ounce) each and bring them back to Earth in 2020.
Research in 2023 showed that these samples contained uracil, which is one of the four bases that make up RNA.
The Ryugu asteroid, hurtling through the Solar System.
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