phosphates tagged posts

A new way of dating collisions between asteroids and planetary bodies throughout our Solar System’s history could help scientists reconstruct how and when planets were born.

A team of researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, combined dating and microscopic analysis of the Chelyabinsk meteorite — which fell to Earth and hit the headlines in 2013 — to get more accurate constraints on the timing of ancient impact events.

Their study, published in Communications Earth & Environment, looked at how minerals within the meteorite were damaged by different impacts over time, meaning they could identify the biggest and oldest events that may have been involved in planetary formation.

“Meteorite impact ages are often controversial: our work shows that we need to draw on multiple...

Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM

All living beings need cells and energy to replicate. Without these fundamental building blocks, living organisms on Earth would not be able to reproduce and would simply not exist. Little was known about a key element in the building blocks, phosphates, until now. University of Hawaii at Manoa researchers, in collaboration with colleagues in France and Taiwan, provide compelling new evidence that this component for life was found to be generated in outer space and delivered to Earth in its first one billion years by meteorites or comets. The phosphorus compounds were then incorporated in biomolecules found in cells in living beings on Earth.

The breakthrough research is outlined in “An Interstellar Synthesis of Phosphorus Oxoacids,” authore...