Scientists Find Evidence That Life on Earth May Have Cosmic Origins
- Editor OGN Daily
- 51 minutes ago
- 2 min read
"This changes everything" says lead researcher on the international team of US, Japanese and NASA scientists.
You may recall NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission that blasted into space in an effort to collect a sample from an an asteroid called Bennu. After arriving at the asteroid in late 2018, the spacecraft performed a 'touch-and-go' manoeuvre on 20 October 2020, and captured roughly 121 grams of ancient dust and rock.
It then, equally remarkably, successfully delivered this pristine piece of the early Solar System to Earth on 24 September 2023, following a seven-year journey. Since then, scientists have been studying the samples in labs across the globe.
By securing the Bennu sample material, OSIRIS-REx has effectively delivered a scientific time capsule could reshape our understanding of how the Solar System formed over 4.5 billion years ago. But perhaps even more importantly, in a major new discovery, scientists have detected bio-essential sugars - including ribose and, for the first time in an extraterrestrial source, glucose - in pristine samples returned to Earth from asteroid Bennu by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. The international team of US, Japanese and NASA researchers found ribose - the sugar backbone of RNA - and glucose, the six-carbon sugar that fuels living cells on Earth.
"This changes everything we thought we knew about where life’s raw materials could have originated," says the study’s lead researcher Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University. "All five nucleobases used to construct both DNA and RNA, along with phosphates, have already been found in the Bennu samples. The new discovery of ribose means that all of the components to form the molecule RNA are present in Bennu."
The discovery marks a striking milestone: offering strong support to the idea that Earth’s early chemistry may have had cosmic origins. The team will now expand analyses to more Bennu fragments, searching for additional organic compounds, isotopic signatures and complex molecules - any of which could sharpen our picture of how life might arise beyond Earth.
