Asteroid Bennu's Amino Acids Carry a Record-Breaking Chemical Fingerprint

Samples of asteroid Bennu, delivered to Earth in 2023 by NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, are still revealing secrets. A team including Penn State researchers studied beta-alanine, one of the most abundant amino acids in space samples, and compared it with beta-alanine from the Murchison meteorite, which fell to Earth in 1969.

Using a new technique that measures carbon isotopes at individual positions inside a molecule, the team found that the average values in the two samples were nearly identical, but the position-by-position patterns were completely different. One carbon atom in Bennu's beta-alanine showed the highest isotope anomaly ever recorded in an organic molecule from space.

The results, published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, suggest the molecules in both samples may have formed through similar chemistry but in different parts of the early solar system. "We are working with molecules formed at the very dawn of the solar system," said Katherine Freeman.

Source: Penn State University, November 10, 2026 — https://www.psu.edu/news/earth-and-mineral-sciences/story/bennu-asteroid-analysis-suggests-unexpected-origins-organics-space

These Paradoxes Keep Scientists Awake At Night!

What Will Happen When Our Sun Dies?

Life on Earth

We saw that the universe was born in the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. After the initial hot, dense fireball of creation cooled sufficiently for atoms to exist, all matter consisted of hydrogen and helium (with a very small amount of lithium). As the universe aged, processes within stars created the other elements, including those that make up Earth (such as iron, silicon, magnesium, and oxygen) and those required for life as we know it, such as carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. These and other elements combined in space to produce a wide variety of compounds that form the basis of life on Earth. In particular, life on Earth is based on the presence of a key unit known as an organic molecule, a molecule that contains carbon. Especially important are the hydrocarbons, chemical compounds made up entirely of hydrogen and carbon, which serve as the basis for our biological chemistry, or biochemistry. While we do not understand the details of how life on Earth began, it is clear that to make creatures like us possible, events like the ones we described must have occurred, resulting in what is called the chemical evolution of the universe.

The Surface Of Light (Lion King Cosmology Parody) | A Capella Science

Александр Иванов - Тоже является частью Вселенной // Юля Кошкина

Ether