The Asteroid Samples Hold Key Ingredients for the Emergence of Life

Two studies published on January 29, 2025 in magazines Nature Astronomy And Nature Highlight that Bennu, an asteroid on which samples were taken in 2020 during the mission Osiris-Rex NASA, would contain chemical elements that have been able to allow life to appear and develop on earth.

Two different analyzes, a surprising conclusion

We are starting to understand today how dinosaurs have appeared and dominated the land for almost 180 million years. But we always waded when it was a question of going back even further in time, in particularly remote eras where life did not yet exist.

To do this and start to see more clearly, NASA has decided to study Bennu, a geocroiser asteroid whose parent body would have formed at the dawn of the solar system, more than 4.5 billion years ago , but which is no longer today. Thanks to samples taken from this space rock, scientists discovered surprises.

The first analysis of the asteroid presented a mixture of many organic compounds. The second, on the other hand, presented traces of minerals which betrayed an old presence of salt water. But the most astonishing was that out of the twenty samples taken from Bennu, more than half contained amino acids, molecules based on any form of life.

Even more, they also found in these samples, traces of the five nucleic bases – adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine and uracil – in other words, the essential genetic components found in the DNA and RNA and therefore in all forms of life.

Has life have developed elsewhere than on earth?

If the samples taken from Bennu therefore reinforce the theory that to see life appear on earth, our planet has been bombed by a multitude of asteroids containing the elements essential to the development of life, they also open the way to a even more theory crazy.

“” “In addition, the fact that these constitutive chemical elements can be formed in space and that they are widespread throughout the solar system increases the chances that life could have developed beyond the earth.“Declared Daniel Glavin, researcher at NASA and co -author of the two studies published on January 29, 2025, in remarks reported by Reuters.

Thus, starting from the theory mentioned by Daniel Glavin, one can imagine that Mars was able, in a very distant past, to see life developing on the surface if it was bombed in the same way as was the Earth.

But that also opens the way to a theory that takes us much further than our solar system. Perhaps at present, life, as we know it, is developing in our galaxy and even beyond.

Source : Reuters / Nasa