Sugars, ‘Gum,’ Stardust Found in NASA’s Asteroid Bennu Samples
Sugars, ‘Gum,’ Stardust Found in NASA’s Asteroid Bennu Samples
Sugars, ‘Gum,’ Stardust Found in NASA’s Asteroid Bennu Samples
Sugars, ‘Gum,’ Stardust Found in NASA’s Asteroid Bennu Samples
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Thats neato and all but now I just wanna watch Stardust.
“Scientists led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University in Japan found sugars essential for biology on Earth in the Bennu samples, detailing their findings in the journal Nature Geoscience. The five-carbon sugar ribose and, for the first time in an extraterrestrial sample, six-carbon glucose were found. Although these sugars are not evidence of life, their detection, along with previous detections of amino acids, nucleobases, and carboxylic acids in Bennu samples, show building blocks of biological molecules were widespread throughout the solar system.”
It’s very interesting to me that this is the first asteroid we’ve sampled and we’ve already found all these precursors to life. Imagine most, if not every asteroid in the galaxy containing precursors similar to these. Then it becomes hard to imagine that panspermia isn’t happening all over the galaxy.