Story highlights Salt crystal samples from meteorites included traces of organic matter and the "ingredients for life"
Researchers hope to study other meteorite samples in the future
(CNN) Although two 4.5-billion-year-old meteorites crashed to Earth in 1998, it's taken until now to uncover some of their secrets.
The two meteorites, called Monahans and Zag, are the first discovered to contain the ingredients for life: liquid water, amino acids, hydrocarbons and other organic matter.
A chemical-makeup analysis of blue and purple salt and potassium crystals from the meteorites was published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.
Although it's not exactly proof that life exists beyond Earth, the traces of water in the salt crystals could date to the earliest days of our solar system. The researchers compared it to finding a prehistoric fly preserved in amber.
A blue crystal recovered from a meteorite that fell near Morocco in 1998.
Before slamming into Earth -- one near a youth basketball game in Texas in March 1998 and another near Morocco in August 1998 -- the meteorites lived in our solar system's asteroid belt for billions of years.
Pluto_and_Charon on January 13rd, 2018 at 13:52 UTC »
Summary:
Two unique, 4.5 billion year old meteorites landed on Earth in 1998.
What makes them special is that they still contain volatile minerals, usually this stuff gets burnt off by the heat of re-entry
Specifically, they have halite (salt) crystals. These only form in the presence of water and so these meteorites must have come from an ocean world at the dawn of the solar system
The salt crystals have organic molecules trapped inside them. In chemistry, organic does not mean life, it means complex carbon-based compounds; although these are crucial to the evolution of life as we know it.
The carbon compounds are unexpectedly complex and include amino acids
This 'ocean world' was probably Ceres or some other large object in the asteroid belt. 4.5 billion years ago, large asteroids were still warm from the heat of their formation and so oceans were widespread across the solar system. Don't think water planet, think more convecting mudball- with a hard rocky surface, but with a muddy ocean underneath.
If complex organic chemistry and liquid water were everywhere 4.5 billion years ago, it increases the chances that life is common in the universe. It also increases the chances that alien life exists on Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus, right now, a possibility that will be investigated by future NASA mission Europa Clipper.
Scientific article link- "Organic matter in extraterrestrial water-bearing salt crystals"
ten-million on January 13rd, 2018 at 12:20 UTC »
"Panspermia is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by space dust, meteoroids, asteroids, comets, planetoids, ...."
Love the term, love the concept.
Snatch_Pastry on January 13rd, 2018 at 10:09 UTC »
Not to bang on this article, but we have known for a long time that hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen exist elsewhere in the solar system. That's the ingredients for life. Slightly more interesting is that the compounds found are probably indicative that liquid water exists/existed somewhere besides earth, which we were also fairly confident of.