A new astronomical study show that some meteorites in space contain clues to life. In the research, scholars confirmed several space rocks that landed on our planet throughout the span of a century indeed had the five bases that store data of life, particularly the DNA and RNA.
Foundation of Life in Meteorites?
Conceptual image of meteoroids delivering nucleobases to ancient Earth. The nucleobases are represented by structural diagrams with hydrogen atoms as white spheres, carbon as black, nitrogen as blue and oxygen as red.
The nucleobases, along with the combination of phosphates and sugars, are known as the foundation of life on Earth. These bases include thymine, uracil, guanine, adenine, and cytosine.
The basic life ingredients were first theorized to have formed from space. A study from Astrobiology, titled "The hot spring hypothesis for an origin of life," suggests a different perspective, in which the cellular life was a product of some kind of primordial chemistry prior to the construction of the planet.
The discovery of some of these nucleobases from meteorites, specifically adenine, and guanine, have been acknowledged by the scientific community since the 1960s. There were other studies that showed the presence of the rare uracil, but the remaining bases, thymine, and cytosine, are still not recovered from the space rocks.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center astrochemistry specialist Daniel Glavin explained that their team was able to complete the set of the DNA and RNA that completes life on our planet, and these bases were also present in the meteorites.
Prior to the new findings, experts from Japan's Hokkaido University, led by geochemist Yasuhiro Oba and colleagues, were successful at developing an approach that effectively and carefully extracts the separate compounds from meteorite dust that was already liquified, reports Science News.
Oba explained that their team's approach included a set of magnitude orders relative to higher sensitivity that were already proven effective in previous studies. The same actuation was demonstrated three years ago when experts detected one of the sugars of life, also known as ribose, in three distinct meteorites.
Set of Meteorites Complete Bases in DNA and RNA
Oba and fellow university scholars collaborated with astrochemists from NASA in order to investigate the same meteorites along with the addition of a set of three new rocks in an attempt to discover the elusive nucleobases that remain.
Instead of the typical acid solution, the team utilized a milder solvent, water, in order to extract the clues of life from the space rocks more carefully. In this way, the bases could be preserved upon extraction and remain intact.
The rates of bases hidden in previous meteorites that fell on Earth were compared to each other. The specified space rocks landed in Kentucky, Australia, and British Columbia. Among the collection of four meteorites from these regions, Oba and Glavin's team identified thymine, uracil, guanine, adenine, and cytosine, along with other corresponding chemicals and amino acids to the bases.
Further studies on the relation between meteorites and the origin of life would be held in the future. Oba's team will also include the data that were collected by Japan's Hayabusa2 mission from an asteroid named Ryugu back in 2020.
NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission will also return similar samples from the space rock Bennu to Earth by 2023.
The study was published in the journal Nature Communications, titled "Identifying the wide diversity of extraterrestrial purine and pyrimidine nucleobases in carbonaceous meteorites."
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