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Amino acids found in asteroid samples collected by Japan's Hayabusa2 probe

316 points by jiocrag 4y ago

darkerside 4y ago
It's this another point in favor of the panspermia hypothesis?
- mkl 4y ago
  No, since this is not life or things definitely made by life. It's a point in favour of pseudo-panspermia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-panspermia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-panspermia). Amino acids have been found in comets before, though it sounds like they found more here.
  - perardi 4y ago
    And what’s quite interesting about the pseudo-panspermia hypothesis… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Homochirality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Homochirality …is the chirality of the molecules we’ve found on comets and meteorites. The amino acids and sugars out in space match what we find in Earth biology. That in way proves that some of the building blocks of life on Earth were generated in the Solar System, but at least it’s a plausible link.
hetspookjee 4y ago
Not the first time they found amino acids on a asteroid, but great news nonetheless. For example the Murchison Meteorite had over 70 different aminoacids found on it while parts of the meteorite being dated as old as 7b years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murchison_meteorite#Nucleobases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murchison_meteorite#Nucleobase...
- jasonlotito 4y ago
  The article mentions this already (that meteorites on earth have been found with amino acids). The important difference here is the in the Murchison case, it was already exposed to Earth's atmosphere and environment, so you couldn't be sure where the amino acids came from.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    Can amino acids survive the intense heat on entry into the atmosphere?
    - arbitrage 4y ago
      Sometimes!
    - Knufferlbert 4y ago
      Apparently it's thought that meteorites hitting the ground freeze water around them after a bit. They get heated up, but it's pretty short, so the bulk of it is "space temperature" only the surface is heating. And a lot of the stuff that heats up is ablated. (depending on size) Unless the stuff is on the surface of the meteorite it's probably fine.
  - vixen99 4y ago
    Yes, but the fact that thirty three of these Murchison amino acids are 'unknown in natural materials other than carbonaceous chondrites' gives pause for thought. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11542462/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11542462/
    - mushbino 4y ago
      What does this mean exactly? Or what could it mean?
      - turndown 4y ago
        That meteor is either proof of pre-Earth life, since those amino acids aren’t known to exist in rock otherwise or proof that the relevant amino acids can be created by an abiotic process. If you don’t want to believe the meteor has been contaminated since it hit the Earth.
- bufferoverflow 4y ago
  > For example the Murchison Meteorite had over 70 different aminoacids found on it In it. Not "on it". A very important distinction. You'd expect to find all kinds of bio stuff on pretty much any solid object.
cletus 4y ago
We again return to the rabbit hole that is the Fermi Paradox [1]. In short: there are so many stars and planets and we've had billions of years. Why aren't ther emore signs of technological life? A core idea of this is that there are various filters that separate a new planet from one hosting spacefaring life. There are lot of these filters proposed. One category is the Great Filter. These are where very few lifeforms are expected to pass. So what we're talking about here is an early filter where a planet forms in a relatively stable and suitable star system and single cellular life forms. Based on our own understanding of biochemistry, that pretty much requires amino acids. Now there might be other forms of life out there but they're all theoretical. We have one which is real (ie ours). We've had a lot of experimentals that show that amino acids can form in deep space on icy bodies. What we have here is direct evidence from an essentially random asteroid that it has amino acids on it. We can and will speculate as to the origins of these. Did they form on the asteroid? Elsewhere? When? You can't obviously draw too many conclusions from a single data point but to suggest we got extremely lucky to find the a super rare asteroid with amino acids on it stretches incredulity. So the conditions that lead to life similar to ours forming being relatively common only gets stronger. This is similar to the number of expoplanets we've found. We've shown that planetary systems are exceedingly common, which was something we could only speculate about a mere 40 years ago. More planets, more conditions for life forming. This means more species are likely getting filtered further down the chain. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > more species are likely getting filtered further down the chain My personal hunch is the filter is around multicellular life. We'll find lots of planets with single-celled goop. Many fewer with animals. The unions that created photosynthesis and mitochondria look to have happened only once (successfully) in Earth's history [1], and sound more like voodoo than science the more one thinks about it. (Cell ate another cell then changed its mind and adopted it for 1.45 billion years.) [1] https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-origin-of-mitochondria-14232356/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-origin-of-mito...
  - 4y ago
ChoGGi 4y ago
Poor Stanley Tweedle
- CosmicShadow 4y ago
  I guess I'm not the only person who still thinks about him
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
LightG 4y ago
I just have to say it ... Hayabusa is such a cool name ... just is.
- madduci 4y ago
  Like the Suzuki motorcycle
mattlondon 4y ago
Hypothetical question: Let's assume for a while that amino acids are everywhere in the solar system or galaxy (if not universe). Let's also assume that there are many earth-like planets. If we found alien life on another earth-like planet, could it be possible that it too would have independently-evolved DNA? Not just DNA-like substances, but chemically identical DNA? I guess I am wondering was DNA such an incredible fluke here on earth that we'll never see it again, or is it "the logical conclusion" for a bunch of similar amino acids in very similar environments? IIRC DNA is a chemically stable structure etc
- rococode 4y ago
  Convergent evolution has been observed many times on Earth. I think it's plausible that a similar process of evolution may be possible for DNA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution
- yababa_y 4y ago
  In https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/60c75885ee301ce974c7b74e https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/60c7588..., they find the common nucleobases are found earlier in enumeration, so you might expect most life use it
- cdumler 4y ago
  It's a good question. It seems there are meany sources, including production on earth[1] and in space. It seems a lot of commonly available chemicals in space if hit with light or electricity will generate them. The open question has been what does it take to generate RNA/DNA. There has been suggestion that RNA would be unlikely to form in open, active water like found on early Earth. However, Mars would have had shallow oceans with large amount of shore area for chemicals to combine in quiet. The Panspermia theory is that RNA/DNA formed there and was ejected by asteroid hits to Earth. Support for that theory is that life appears to have formed within a few hundred million years of it being possible on Earth, which seems far too short of a time for RNA/DNA to form spontaneously in an ocean Earth. If this is all true, life may be a fluke and requiring a rather stable set of environments to work. All of this is hard to know with a sample size of one, though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment
mekoka 4y ago
Finding amino acids on an asteroid confirms something we already knew. They can be available without showing evidence of life. The real mystery thus remains life itself. The fact that on Earth it used amino acids to express itself doesn't mean that it is necessarily limited to that single choice. It also doesn't mean that the same process would repeat in a different world, even if all the preconditions were met, i.e. the necessary for the presence of life as we can recognize it. For all our understanding of (earthly) biology, and the tools at our disposal that we use to decide that something is alive, we still don't really know what life is, or how it begins. On another world it might as well kickstart the magic with a different medium than amino acids (e.g. more crystalline structures, some energy forms such as light or electricity, etc), with entirely different rules of replication and sustenance. It would probably make life look different to us, potentially not recognizable or even detectable. Heck, it could happen right here, under our nose and we'd be none the wiser.
- tgarv 4y ago
  I've always wondered about this too, but kind of landed on something like this: Sure, there might be (and probably is) life out there that falls so far outside our definition of "life" that we would never detect it. If it's undetectable, and maybe even incomprehensible, to us, then what's the point in even thinking about it in the context of a "search for life"? What we really mean by the question "Is there life out there?" is "Is there life out there that's similar enough to the life we see on Earth that we could recognize it as such and interact with it?" I don't have a good way to phrase what I'm getting at without sounding dismissive - I do think it's interesting to think about other forms of "life", but it seems almost philosophical at that point and not scientific.
  - nsv 4y ago
    In other words - if you can't observe it, does it really exist?
    - CRConrad 4y ago
      "If a tree falls on your head in the forest, but I can't hear you scream, do I care" kind of thing? ;-)
andrewflnr 4y ago
> "Proving amino acids exist in the subsurface of asteroids increases the likelihood that the compounds arrived on Earth from space," he said. Are we sure it doesn't just mean the compounds were already sitting on Earth for the same reason they're sitting on the asteroid? I guess maybe if literally all of them were cooked to death in the Hadean and had to be refreshed from space, but then how do they avoid being cooked to death in asteroid impacts?
- hetspookjee 4y ago
  I belief the latest theories state thet life started already before the end of the Hadean. From that I conclude that cooking to death occurs less than one might think. 4.1B years ago while the hadean ended 4B years. https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-may-have-found-earliest-evidence-life-earth https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-may-have-...
  - andrewflnr 4y ago
    I think I was just using "Hadean" incorrectly to refer to "when the Earth was still basically molten". Thinking/reading about it some more I'm not sure that was ever enough of a thing to actually cook off organic molecules (but if it was, yeah it definitely ended early enough for life to start really dang early).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BurningFrog 4y ago
My intuition is that life was formed using amino acids because they are common substances that occur naturally where liquid water is around. Not because they have any unique lifeforming property.
unixhero 4y ago
So life beyond Mars confirmed then?
- MattPalmer1086 4y ago
  No, but some building blocks of life are found on an asteroid. So we know now that those molecules are present there. We have found amino acids in gas clouds in space before.
  - JasserInicide 4y ago
    Wait what? How was that not bigger news?? How is not finding them on an asteroid not bigger news??? This brings up many more questions than answers, but how is it not possible at least to say that we're not the only place in the universe where life exists?
    - Engineering-MD 4y ago
      I think the conclusion is more amino acids form naturally without life rather than amino acid based life is widespread.
      - MattPalmer1086 4y ago
        Indeed. It would actually be more surprising if it turned out the molecules we are built from do not arise easily and naturally. This doesn't mean that all life would be based off them though.
    - ivanbakel 4y ago
      Because naturally-occurring amino acids are nothing new. You can make them yourself by sticking some chemicals together and applying energy to the mixture [0]. "Building blocks of life" is a phrase with no strong definition. Science journalists like to apply it to anything from water to DNA chains, though those are very different molecules in terms of complexity. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment
Teever 4y ago
Can anyone point me in the right direction of a paper that talks more about this?
- xupybd 4y ago
  I'm not sure if you're asking specifically about this data or the General topic. If it's the general topic the Wikipedia article links to a few. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-panspermia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-panspermia
- flobosg 4y ago
  “Soluble Organic Compounds in Asteroid 162173 Ryugu”: https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2022/pdf/1781.pdf https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2022/pdf/1781.pdf

316 points by jiocrag 4y ago

darkerside 4y ago

It's this another point in favor of the panspermia hypothesis?

mkl 4y ago
No, since this is not life or things definitely made by life. It's a point in favour of pseudo-panspermia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-panspermia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-panspermia). Amino acids have been found in comets before, though it sounds like they found more here.
- perardi 4y ago
  And what’s quite interesting about the pseudo-panspermia hypothesis… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Homochirality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Homochirality …is the chirality of the molecules we’ve found on comets and meteorites. The amino acids and sugars out in space match what we find in Earth biology. That in way proves that some of the building blocks of life on Earth were generated in the Solar System, but at least it’s a plausible link.

hetspookjee 4y ago

Not the first time they found amino acids on a asteroid, but great news nonetheless. For example the Murchison Meteorite had over 70 different aminoacids found on it while parts of the meteorite being dated as old as 7b years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murchison_meteorite#Nucleobases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murchison_meteorite#Nucleobase...

jasonlotito 4y ago
The article mentions this already (that meteorites on earth have been found with amino acids). The important difference here is the in the Murchison case, it was already exposed to Earth's atmosphere and environment, so you couldn't be sure where the amino acids came from.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  Can amino acids survive the intense heat on entry into the atmosphere?
  - arbitrage 4y ago
    Sometimes!
  - Knufferlbert 4y ago
    Apparently it's thought that meteorites hitting the ground freeze water around them after a bit. They get heated up, but it's pretty short, so the bulk of it is "space temperature" only the surface is heating. And a lot of the stuff that heats up is ablated. (depending on size) Unless the stuff is on the surface of the meteorite it's probably fine.
- vixen99 4y ago
  Yes, but the fact that thirty three of these Murchison amino acids are 'unknown in natural materials other than carbonaceous chondrites' gives pause for thought. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11542462/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11542462/
  - mushbino 4y ago
    What does this mean exactly? Or what could it mean?
    - turndown 4y ago
      That meteor is either proof of pre-Earth life, since those amino acids aren’t known to exist in rock otherwise or proof that the relevant amino acids can be created by an abiotic process. If you don’t want to believe the meteor has been contaminated since it hit the Earth.
bufferoverflow 4y ago
> For example the Murchison Meteorite had over 70 different aminoacids found on it In it. Not "on it". A very important distinction. You'd expect to find all kinds of bio stuff on pretty much any solid object.

cletus 4y ago

We again return to the rabbit hole that is the Fermi Paradox [1]. In short: there are so many stars and planets and we've had billions of years. Why aren't ther emore signs of technological life? A core idea of this is that there are various filters that separate a new planet from one hosting spacefaring life. There are lot of these filters proposed. One category is the Great Filter. These are where very few lifeforms are expected to pass. So what we're talking about here is an early filter where a planet forms in a relatively stable and suitable star system and single cellular life forms. Based on our own understanding of biochemistry, that pretty much requires amino acids. Now there might be other forms of life out there but they're all theoretical. We have one which is real (ie ours). We've had a lot of experimentals that show that amino acids can form in deep space on icy bodies. What we have here is direct evidence from an essentially random asteroid that it has amino acids on it. We can and will speculate as to the origins of these. Did they form on the asteroid? Elsewhere? When? You can't obviously draw too many conclusions from a single data point but to suggest we got extremely lucky to find the a super rare asteroid with amino acids on it stretches incredulity. So the conditions that lead to life similar to ours forming being relatively common only gets stronger. This is similar to the number of expoplanets we've found. We've shown that planetary systems are exceedingly common, which was something we could only speculate about a mere 40 years ago. More planets, more conditions for life forming. This means more species are likely getting filtered further down the chain. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> more species are likely getting filtered further down the chain My personal hunch is the filter is around multicellular life. We'll find lots of planets with single-celled goop. Many fewer with animals. The unions that created photosynthesis and mitochondria look to have happened only once (successfully) in Earth's history [1], and sound more like voodoo than science the more one thinks about it. (Cell ate another cell then changed its mind and adopted it for 1.45 billion years.) [1] https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-origin-of-mitochondria-14232356/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-origin-of-mito...
- 4y ago

ChoGGi 4y ago

Poor Stanley Tweedle

CosmicShadow 4y ago
I guess I'm not the only person who still thinks about him

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

LightG 4y ago

I just have to say it ... Hayabusa is such a cool name ... just is.

madduci 4y ago
Like the Suzuki motorcycle

mattlondon 4y ago

Hypothetical question: Let's assume for a while that amino acids are everywhere in the solar system or galaxy (if not universe). Let's also assume that there are many earth-like planets. If we found alien life on another earth-like planet, could it be possible that it too would have independently-evolved DNA? Not just DNA-like substances, but chemically identical DNA? I guess I am wondering was DNA such an incredible fluke here on earth that we'll never see it again, or is it "the logical conclusion" for a bunch of similar amino acids in very similar environments? IIRC DNA is a chemically stable structure etc

rococode 4y ago
Convergent evolution has been observed many times on Earth. I think it's plausible that a similar process of evolution may be possible for DNA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution
yababa_y 4y ago
In https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/60c75885ee301ce974c7b74e https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/60c7588..., they find the common nucleobases are found earlier in enumeration, so you might expect most life use it
cdumler 4y ago
It's a good question. It seems there are meany sources, including production on earth[1] and in space. It seems a lot of commonly available chemicals in space if hit with light or electricity will generate them. The open question has been what does it take to generate RNA/DNA. There has been suggestion that RNA would be unlikely to form in open, active water like found on early Earth. However, Mars would have had shallow oceans with large amount of shore area for chemicals to combine in quiet. The Panspermia theory is that RNA/DNA formed there and was ejected by asteroid hits to Earth. Support for that theory is that life appears to have formed within a few hundred million years of it being possible on Earth, which seems far too short of a time for RNA/DNA to form spontaneously in an ocean Earth. If this is all true, life may be a fluke and requiring a rather stable set of environments to work. All of this is hard to know with a sample size of one, though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment

mekoka 4y ago

Finding amino acids on an asteroid confirms something we already knew. They can be available without showing evidence of life. The real mystery thus remains life itself. The fact that on Earth it used amino acids to express itself doesn't mean that it is necessarily limited to that single choice. It also doesn't mean that the same process would repeat in a different world, even if all the preconditions were met, i.e. the necessary for the presence of life as we can recognize it. For all our understanding of (earthly) biology, and the tools at our disposal that we use to decide that something is alive, we still don't really know what life is, or how it begins. On another world it might as well kickstart the magic with a different medium than amino acids (e.g. more crystalline structures, some energy forms such as light or electricity, etc), with entirely different rules of replication and sustenance. It would probably make life look different to us, potentially not recognizable or even detectable. Heck, it could happen right here, under our nose and we'd be none the wiser.

tgarv 4y ago
I've always wondered about this too, but kind of landed on something like this: Sure, there might be (and probably is) life out there that falls so far outside our definition of "life" that we would never detect it. If it's undetectable, and maybe even incomprehensible, to us, then what's the point in even thinking about it in the context of a "search for life"? What we really mean by the question "Is there life out there?" is "Is there life out there that's similar enough to the life we see on Earth that we could recognize it as such and interact with it?" I don't have a good way to phrase what I'm getting at without sounding dismissive - I do think it's interesting to think about other forms of "life", but it seems almost philosophical at that point and not scientific.
- nsv 4y ago
  In other words - if you can't observe it, does it really exist?
  - CRConrad 4y ago
    "If a tree falls on your head in the forest, but I can't hear you scream, do I care" kind of thing? ;-)

andrewflnr 4y ago

> "Proving amino acids exist in the subsurface of asteroids increases the likelihood that the compounds arrived on Earth from space," he said. Are we sure it doesn't just mean the compounds were already sitting on Earth for the same reason they're sitting on the asteroid? I guess maybe if literally all of them were cooked to death in the Hadean and had to be refreshed from space, but then how do they avoid being cooked to death in asteroid impacts?

hetspookjee 4y ago
I belief the latest theories state thet life started already before the end of the Hadean. From that I conclude that cooking to death occurs less than one might think. 4.1B years ago while the hadean ended 4B years. https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-may-have-found-earliest-evidence-life-earth https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-may-have-...
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  I think I was just using "Hadean" incorrectly to refer to "when the Earth was still basically molten". Thinking/reading about it some more I'm not sure that was ever enough of a thing to actually cook off organic molecules (but if it was, yeah it definitely ended early enough for life to start really dang early).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

BurningFrog 4y ago

My intuition is that life was formed using amino acids because they are common substances that occur naturally where liquid water is around. Not because they have any unique lifeforming property.

unixhero 4y ago

So life beyond Mars confirmed then?

MattPalmer1086 4y ago
No, but some building blocks of life are found on an asteroid. So we know now that those molecules are present there. We have found amino acids in gas clouds in space before.
- JasserInicide 4y ago
  Wait what? How was that not bigger news?? How is not finding them on an asteroid not bigger news??? This brings up many more questions than answers, but how is it not possible at least to say that we're not the only place in the universe where life exists?
  - Engineering-MD 4y ago
    I think the conclusion is more amino acids form naturally without life rather than amino acid based life is widespread.
    - MattPalmer1086 4y ago
      Indeed. It would actually be more surprising if it turned out the molecules we are built from do not arise easily and naturally. This doesn't mean that all life would be based off them though.
  - ivanbakel 4y ago
    Because naturally-occurring amino acids are nothing new. You can make them yourself by sticking some chemicals together and applying energy to the mixture [0]. "Building blocks of life" is a phrase with no strong definition. Science journalists like to apply it to anything from water to DNA chains, though those are very different molecules in terms of complexity. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment

Teever 4y ago

Can anyone point me in the right direction of a paper that talks more about this?

xupybd 4y ago
I'm not sure if you're asking specifically about this data or the General topic. If it's the general topic the Wikipedia article links to a few. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-panspermia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-panspermia
flobosg 4y ago
“Soluble Organic Compounds in Asteroid 162173 Ryugu”: https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2022/pdf/1781.pdf https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2022/pdf/1781.pdf