Bennu asteroid tagged posts

Building blocks of life discovered in Bennu asteroid rewrite origin story

A gloved hand holds a vial with dust
Analyzing a precious bit of space dust no bigger than a teaspoon, the Penn State team used custom instruments capable of measuring isotopes, slight variations in the mass of atoms. Credit: Jaydyn Isiminger / Penn State. Creative Commons

Amino acids, the building blocks necessary for life, were previously found in samples of 4.6-billion-year-old rocks from an asteroid called Bennu, delivered to Earth in 2023 by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. How those amino acids—the molecules that create proteins and peptides in DNA—formed in space was a mystery, but new research led by Penn State scientists shows they could have originated in an icy-cold, radioactive environment at the dawn of Earth’s solar system.

According to the researchers, who published new findings in the Proceedings of th...

Read More