![]() The new find suggests that amino acids may have been delivered to Earth on asteroids like Ryugu, reports Stephen Luntz for IFL Science. Ryugu age, surface and rock composition can give researchers a look at the early period in time, reports Gizmodo's Isaac Schultz.Īmino acids are the building blocks of life because they string together to form proteins, which carry out most chemical processes in cellular life. The carbon-rich asteroid is of interest to researchers because it has remained unchanged since the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. ![]() This study is the first to go looking for amino acids in these samples. A previous study looked at the mineral and chemical composition of samples taken from Ryugu on the same mission by Hayabusa2. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Hayabusa2 asteroid explorer collected about 5.4 grams of gritty, ashy particles from the space rock's surface and returned them to Earth on December 6, 2020. The molecules were found in samples from the asteroid dubbed 162173 Ryugu. The findings were presented at the Lunar and Planetary Conference in March 2022. The detection is the first time amino acids have been found to exist on asteroids in space and may have implications in understanding how organic molecules arrived on Earth, reports the Japan Times. Researchers say they have found more than ten types of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, in samples collected from a diamond-shaped asteroid 200 million miles from Earth.
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