Analysis of material from the asteroid Ryugu suggests that Earth may have received crucial ingredients for life from distant parts of our solar system. The composition of Ryugu, rich in carbon and other essential elements, points to a cosmic delivery system that seeded early Earth with the building blocks of biology.
that is essential for biology. Then too, Earth simply lacked the chemistry to produce biology. The human body, to take just one life form, is made up ofof the total. That’s a long recipe list, and our planet was short on many of those key ingredients.
The IAS team, along with other colleagues from France, as well as Japan and the U.K., were looking not only for organic elements and compounds in the sample, but specifically elements and compounds in their hydrated form—that is, with water molecules in the mix. Finding those forms would establish that the grains originated in deep space—out beyond what is known as the snow line.
“Sapphire can be cut pure and is transparent in the infrared,” says Jean-Pierre Bibring, professor of astrophysics at the IAS. A tiny mirror was positioned beneath the grains to reflect away errant light, but the mirror was made of polished gold, not glass. “We want a mirror that does not produce any potential contamination,” Bibring says. “We made it of gold because we know how to make a very flat, very pure gold surface.
There were other clues that rocks like Ryugu served as ancient delivery trucks for biological chemicals. The ratio of phosphorus to carbon—the P/C ratio—in Ryugu samples is about 1 to 100. That, as it happens, is precisely what the P/C ratio is in the earthly biomass, suggesting—though not confirming—that the carbon chemistry of such asteroids helped shape the chemistry of our planet.
Asteroidryugu Earlyearth Cosmicdelivery Lifeorigins Solarsystemchemistry
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