Components for life could have originated from space and not on Earth, says the new report on sampling meteorites

Life could have originated here on earth due to meteorites from space.

Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, Thymine, and Uracil, the five bases which make up DNA and RNA with sugar and phosphate groups are the very things life on earth has originated from, and where could have these first originate from to make up life. The most probable theory to date has been the “hot spring” theory, a hot of chemicals that gave birth to life billions of years ago, which suggests life originated on Earth.

But could life have come from space? Well, the new discovery in the scientist’s report suggests so, having found the 5 bases for life on meteorites.

Now, scientists have found the 5 bases and also detecting pyrimidines and purines which basically determine the structure of the molecule, as hexagonal and pentagonal molecules, with methods way more sensitive than we have ever used before, with a range of parts per trillion.

Yasuhiro Oba an astrochemist at Hokkaido University of Japan, one of the lead researchers in the report, with his colleagues measured an abundance of the bases and other compounds like sugars and ribose, which are necessary for life in the range of parts per billion from samples of meteorites that fell decades ago in Australia, Kentucky and British Columbia, and in all the samples, the team was able to detect, A, G, C, T, U base, amino acids, and other compounds.

Source: NASA

To check for any contamination from the sites where these meteorites landed, they also tested the soil from Australia from the site where one of the samples was found, and the chemical abundance of the soil was less than the meteorite in some cases of compounds, which reinforces the theory of components of life coming from space even further. The only case of contamination they were able to find was of Cytosine and Uracil, where the soil has 20 times as high levels as the meteorite sample.

As further research is done on their samples and on new samples from not just meteorites but also from asteroids, asteroid Ryugu to be specific, the asteroid from which Japan’s mission brings an asteroid sample back to earth later this year, could prove where and how life originated.

Source: Nature communications