When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.An artist’s impression of OSIRIS-REx above the surface of Bennu. | Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of ArizonaThe origins of the building blocks of life may be even more widespread than we realized, as per a new discovery from the asteroid sample NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission brought back to Earth from the space rock Bennu.At least 14 of the 20 amino acids used by life on Earth, and 19 other amino acids not used by life, have been identified in the sample from Bennu, which was delivered to Earth in September 2023. It had been thought that these amino acids had formed in warm, watery conditions close to the infant sun 4.5 billion years ago.AdvertisementAdvertisementHowever, a new analysis of the isotopes contained within the amino acids points to a much colder origin for the compounds: in the presence of ice far away from the young sun.”This confirms that life’s building blocks can be formed in a diversity of environments throughout the universe,” Allison Baczynski, an organic chemist at Penn State University and co-lead author of the new study, told Space.com.Baczynski led a team who investigated the isotopic composition of Bennu’s amino acids, focusing on the simplest amino acid in the sample, which is glycine. On Earth, glycine forms when hydrogen cyanide, ammonia and organic compounds called aldehydes react with each other in warm water. Baczynski’s team used the Murchison meteorite that fell in Australia in 1969 as a reference; the amino acids found in Murchison have an isotopic composition that suggests they formed in this manner.On the other hand, Bennu’s glycine, and other amino acids present, have isotopic compositions that differ from the Murchison amino acids. Instead, their isotopic composition matches what could be expected from having formed in a chemically distinct and frozen environment farther from the sun, though still dowsed in the solar ultraviolet radiation required to trigger the reaction to form …
