Five grams of the oldest, most pristine matter left over from the solar system's formation was delivered by the Hayabusa2 space mission. Scientists revealed last spring that the asteroid contains 10 amino acids. Evidence that the primordial soup from which life on Earth arose may have been seasoned with asteroids was added to by the discovery.
Where did these acids originate? Plants produce the majority of the amino acids flowing through our system. They were in meteorites and asteroids.
Recent work by researchers in Japan points to a new way that scientists have come up with. It seems more likely that meteorites played a part in the origin of life on Earth.
If there is enough energy, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen compounds can be used to cook up amino acids. Stanley Miller and Harold Urey made a mixture of organic compounds using an electrical discharge in a gaseous mixture of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen. There was a discovery in the late 1990s that suggested that there could be some form of strontium in the seafloor.
After 1969 there was a chance that the original amino acids might have come from space. Scientists think the meteorites were formed from smaller icy bodies after the solar system first formed. Scientists couldn't rule out the possibility that the amino acids were a result of the impact, but they found small but significant amounts of them.
Space scientists knew that the icy dust bodies that formed carbonaceous chondrites were likely to contain water, ammonia, and small carbon molecule like aldehydes and Methanol. A source of energy was the only thing they needed. Ultra violet radiation from supernovas could have been strong enough to do it. The heated dust bodies could have been caused by the collision between the dust bodies.
Scott Sandford is an astronomer at the Ames Research Center. There is no reason to think that all of them happened.
A group of researchers at Yokohama National University in Japan, led by the chemists Kensei Kobayashi andyoko Kebukawa, have shown that the amino acids inchondrites could have been produced by the rays of the sun. They showed that the radioactive elements in the chondrites could convert carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen into compounds that are useful in chemistry.
It's possible to destroy organic compounds as easily as it can. In the Japanese team's experiments, the enhancement of amino acid production was more effective than the destruction. The researchers used the rates of production observed in their experiments to come up with a figure of how long it would take for a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid to reach the levels seen in the meteorite.
Extra relevance to origin-of-life scenarios can be found in the fact that this mechanism can penetrate deep into the interior of asteroids or meteorites. Sandford said that it opens up a whole new environment in which Amino acids can be made. He said that the middle part of the meteorites could survive even if the outside were to abate. You are also making them on the way to a planet.
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