Analysis of dust ferried home from asteroid Ryugu has been found to contain uracil – one of the four nucleobases that make up RNA – in addition to niacin, a form of the vitamin B3, which plays an important role in metabolism.
This adds to a growing body of evidence that the building blocks for life form in space, and may have been at least partially delivered to Earth by asteroid bombardment early in our planet's history.
How life emerged, and how common that emergence might be across the Milky Way galaxy, are two questions that humanity would love to know the answers to. One way to interrogate them is to seek the building blocks of life in space, and explore potential mechanisms for their delivery from out there to down here.
As we are increasingly discovering, the building blocks for life out there are plentiful. They've been spotted in planet-forming dust, and in the clouds of star-forming dust that shroud the heart of our galaxy. And they've been found in multiple meteorites that have penetrated Earth's atmosphere and fallen to ground.
Source: www.sciencealert.com
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