Scientists Just Found All 5 Genetic “Letters” of DNA and RNA on an Asteroid
The discovery of all five nucleobases on Ryugu strengthens the idea that life’s molecular ingredients formed in space before reaching Earth.
A new study reports that samples from the asteroid Ryugu contain all five fundamental nucleobases, the molecular “letters” of life.
Tiny asteroid grains can preserve chemical clues about the ingredients that may have helped life emerge on Earth. The Ryugu material was returned from space in 2020 by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Hayabusa2 mission.
In 2023, an international research team reported finding uracil, one of the nucleobases, in the Ryugu samples. Now, a study published on March 16, 2026, in Nature Astronomy by Japanese scientists has confirmed that all five nucleobases are present in the pristine asteroid material.
The finding suggests that these life related ingredients may have been common across the young Solar System...
https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-just-found-all-5-genetic-letters-of-dna-and-rna-on-an-asteroid/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
This is amazing. Panspermia for the win. There's definitely life out there.
of course there is. There is nowhere on earth, under any conditions, where bacteria are not found.
Alright, easy there, Fox Mulder.
I think that stellar bodies like Pluto, which has volatile ices, might represent one of the most likely places for things like this to form. The biggest issues I see with "earth bound abiogenisis" is the concentration issue. You need some physical process to concentrate "stuff that life is made from" into a small enough area to create interesting chemistry. Oceans and even most lakes don't work for this. Shits just too dillute for anything interesting to happen.
But an object like pluto, in the flyby a few years ago, you can clearly see a geological process operating on its surface, related to the repeated freezing and thawing of volatile ices on its surface based on its oblong orbital path. This represents a potential pathway where interesting biological precursors can pile up over time, and it can just keep going and going and going. It can basically run indefinitely, concentrating organics and precursor chemicals almost indefinitely.
Then, couple that with a finding like this one, about asteroid impacts resulting in the development of thermal vents, and now you have a mechanism where high concentrations of organic precursors, having piled up on an asteroid for millions of years, could slam into the earth and create their own conditions for a cycle where much more interesting chemistry could occur.
jeez... guanosine, adenine, uracil, thymine, cytosine. This means both DNA and RNA.
Well damn, I knew I left 'em somewhere.