How an asteroid might have brought the essential components for life on Earth "blew us away"

Billions of years ago, a wet, salty world circled our sun. It then collided with a catastrophic conflict, with another object, falling apart. One of these lumps has now become Astide Benne. The mineral recently returned to Earth from the US robotic probe Osiris Rex and now contains a wide range of complex chemicals that are extremely important for the existence of life.

"There was something about Benne's rehearsal that completely blew us away," said Professor Sarah Russell, a space mineralogist at the Museum of Natural History in London and author of a large-scale study on the properties of Benne minerals. "The diversity of conserved molecules and minerals differs from all extraterrestrial samples previously tested."

The results of these and other missions form the central exhibition, which begins on May 16th, at the Museum of Natural History, The Space: Life Beyond the Earth. According to Russell, knowing about the latest developments in hunting life in other worlds would be an important opportunity for the public. You can find out how the exhibition is revealed, and the basic chemical building blocks of life, in other objects in the solar system, such as meteorites.

The Bennu material, named after the old Egyptian mythical bird, has proven to be particularly abundant in these deposits. "There was an underground salt lake in his parents' world, and when they evaporated, they left behind salt, leaving behind similar ones found on the arid seabeds on Earth," Russell said.

Furthermore, dozens of protein-building amino acids available in phosphates, ammonia, and life forms on Earth, as well as five nucleotide-based modules of RNA and DNA, are included in samples taken back by Osiris-Rex. "These are strong signs that asteroids like Bennu jumped into Earth and led to the critical components here," she added.

Scientists do not believe that life in Bennu developed, but other asteroids believe that other worlds with the basic components of life could have brought them. In a warm and stable environment, this led to the first appearance of reproductive organisms over 3.7 billion years ago.

It remains to be seen whether they have appeared in other promising worlds, such as Mars and Monsman, due to Jupiter and Saturn, including Ganymede, Titan, and Enceladus. Today, these are the subject of a series of missions that can be seen at the exhibition, and include two probes currently passing through ice-covered Mondo Europe and Ganymede Europe and Ganam Dede.

Furthermore, Rosalind Franklin's robot rover, built in the UK, landed on Mars in 2029 and delved deep into the ground to find evidence of life. In the past, extraterrestrial rock rehearsals made available on the course were primarily metstones, fragments of the moon brought back by astronauts and robotic probes, and then blew them off towards Earth, and finally blown into space like space, like space, as large objects on a red planet.

Visitors to the exhibition will be able to touch samples of Moon and Mars material, as well as Metstone samples that landed on Earth after being blasted from an asteroid. Interestingly, this stone is older than the Earth itself. "This will be a huge hit," said Sinead Marron, senior exhibition manager at the museum.

Osiris-Rex took 120 G Bennu Dust back to Earth, and the museum was given about 200 mg to study, Russell said. "When I first opened the capsule, I saw this black dust with white particles. He thought it could be contaminated. However, it turned out to be a connection between phosphorus that was not seen in metstone, but it is absolutely important for the development of life."

The outlook that life could exist elsewhere in the universe was made headlines last week when it became known that an observation of the Exoplanet K2-18B revealed the chemical fingerprints of two connections made only on Earth. In itself, the chemicals, dimethyl dimethyl sulfide (DMS), and dimethyldisulfide (DMDS), do not imply evidence of non-foreign biological activity, but they raise hopes that we are not alone in the universe.

ultimately proves that living in a distant world outside our solar system is extremely difficult, just before the signal of extraterrestrial intelligence that announces its existence.

In contrast, extra-solar life in our solar system makes it easier to collect and study, and one day we can prove that life in other worlds exists.

"What we do about discoveries like this is another thing," Maron said. "One of the things we think about is how we treat life if we find it on Mars or another world. Are we separated from it, or will we try to interact with it? "Or, do we try to eat this planet as if we are eating an important form that shares it? Such questions about alien life can help us think about how we can deal with other life forms in our world."