RESEARCHERS JUST FOUND ALL FIVE BUILDING BLOCKS FOR RNA/DNA IN RYUGU ASTEROID SAMPLES
With all that’s been going on on planet Earth, you might not be up to date about some news from off the planet from the last dozen years. And while most of that news was and is maybe only exciting for space geeks, a recent update should be exciting for pretty much everyone. The story starts in 2014, when Japan’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft launched. The start of its mission was travellng 300 million km, and then landing on a 900 meter wide asteroid. It then grabbed 5.4 grams of rock, and made its way home to Earth in 2020. This was, of course, the Ryugu asteroid. But a recent study of those samples revealed all the building blocks you need to make DNA and RNA.
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THIS DISCOVERY MEANS FOUNDATIONS FOR LIFE COULD BE ALL OVER THE GALAXY
In a word, this is stunning news. These building blocks, or nucleobase, have been a topic for decades, mostly about how we haven’t found them all off of planet Earth (and not together) until fairly recently, and how that maybe means there’s no other life out there in the big, wide universe. But now we’ve found them all, found them together, and on the Ryugu asteroid which is traveling thru space. The nucleobase, or building blocks for RNA/DNA, are adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine, and uracil. A research team looking at these samples in 2023 only found the last, uracil.
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A PRIMITIVE RYUGU ASTEROID CAN DELIVER THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF LIFE WHEREVER IT LANDS
A team in Japan led by Toshiki Koga made the recent discovery of all five. Previously, NASA found these same life as we know it building blocks on the asteroid Bennu, as well as in the Orgueil and Murchison meteorites. So why is this a big deal, and stunning? According to Koga, “Their presence indicates that primitive asteroids could produce and preserve molecules that are important for the chemistry related to the origin of life.” But the recent research also found a correlation between nucleobase ratios and ammonia concentration, which they explained as “a previously unrecognized pathway for nucleobase formation.”
What does this mean? It means that the foundations for life are literally floating around in space, moving around in space. It means that the building blocks for all life on Earth more than likely came from…. space. You can read more about this new discovery here.
