Two organic components necessary for living organisms were found in samples brought from the asteroid Diogo, in a discovery that supports the idea that some of the components necessary for the emergence of life arrived on Earth on the back of rocks from space billions of years ago.
Scientists said they had identified the presence of uracil and niacin in rocks obtained by the Japanese Space Agency's Hayabusa2 spacecraft from two sites on the asteroid Diogo in 2019. Uracil is a chemical component of RNA, a molecule that carries instructions for how organisms build and perform their vital functions. Niacin, also called vitamin B3, is essential for metabolism.
Diogo's samples, which look like dark gray debris, were transported 250 million kilometers to Earth and back to the surface of our planet in a sealed space capsule that landed in 2020 in the remote part of Australia, after which samples it brought back in Japan would be analyzed.
Scientists have long thought about the conditions necessary for the emergence of life after the formation of the Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The new discoveries are consistent with the hypothesis that bodies such as comets, asteroids and meteorites that fell like bombs on Earth in the early stages of their lives filled the newly created planet with chemical compounds that contributed to paving the way for the emergence of the first microbes.
Scientists previously discovered important organic molecules in carbon-rich meteorites found on Earth. However, the question remained whether these space rocks were contaminated with these particles through exposure to the Earth's environment after landing on it.
"Our main discovery is that uracil and niacin, both of which are vitally important, are definitely present in space environments and may have arrived on Earth early as elements in the formation of asteroids and meteorites," said Yashiro Oba, an astrophysicist from Hokkaido University in Japan. Earth and may (play a role) in the emergence of life on Earth." Uba is a lead author on the study published in the journal Nature Communications.
"These particles were brought from Diogu in their pure space state... They were collected directly on Diogu and then brought to Earth, and finally to laboratories, without exposure to any terrestrial pollutants," Ohba added. The researchers extracted uracil, niacin and some other organic compounds from Diogo's samples by conducting analyses to separate the materials into their original components.
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