How Did Life Happen? NASA Says It Found Tantalizing Clues on Asteroid Bennu

New research announced by NASA on Tuesday details a bevy of exciting discoveries from asteroid dust that could provide clues to how life developed in our neck of the cosmos, including the sugars required for basic life forms, a mysterious gum-like substance and a surprising amount of stardust from supernovae. 

NASA’s robot spacecraft, Osiris-Rex, scooped up rocks and dust from the asteroid Bennu in 2020 and delivered the sample to Earth in 2023. Since then, scientists around the globe have been studying the space rocks to gain insight into the early days of our solar system. 

Yoshihiro Furukawa, a scientist from Tohoku University in Japan, led a team that found the sugar. It’s the first time scientists have discovered six-carbon glucose — a universal source of carbon and fuel for life forms — in an extraterrestrial sample. Five-carbon sugar ribose was also present in the samples, but this type of sugar has previously been found in space. 

“Although these sugars are not evidence of life, their detection, along with previous detections of amino acids, nucleobases and carboxylic acids in Bennu samples, show building blocks of biological molecules were widespread throughout the solar system,” the NASA release states. 

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Furukawa said in a statement that all of the nucleobases needed to build DNA and RNA have already been found in the Bennu samples, so “the new discovery of ribose means that all of the components to form the molecule RNA are present in Bennu.”

The findings were published in Nature on Tuesday, and the researchers say their work supports a hypothesis called RNA World. The hypothesis relates to the origins of life on our planet. It states that before complex life existed on Earth, there was an RNA world that predated the development of modern cells. 

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Ancient ‘space gum’ and supernovae dust

Aside from life-building sugars, the Bennu sample holds a few other interesting findings. A pair of researchers named Scott Sandford (from NASA’s Ames Research Center) and Zack Gainsforth (from the University of California, Berkeley) also released a paper in Nature on Tuesday about a “gum-like” material that’s never been found on space rocks before now. 

Originally, the substance was soft and flexible, the researchers say, but it hardened over time. The space gum is made of “polymer-like materials extremely rich in nitrogen and oxygen.” This is a significant development, NASA says, because it could contain some of the “chemical precursors” that helped initiate life on our planet. 

“With this strange substance we’re looking at, quite possibly, one of the earliest alterations of materials that occurred in this rock,” Sandford said in a statement. “On this primitive asteroid that formed in the early days of the solar system, we’re looking at events near the beginning of the beginning.”

Yet a third paper published in Nature on Tuesday from a research team led by Ann Nguyen (NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston) looked into dust found on the Bennu samples that came from stars older than our own solar system. There was a lot more supernova dust than expected. 

The samples held six times more stardust than scientists have found on any other astromaterial. 

“Their preservation in the Bennu samples was a surprise and illustrates that some material escaped alteration in the parent body,” Nguyen said in a statement. “Our study reveals the diversity of presolar materials that the parent accreted as it was forming.”

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center provided overall mission management for Osiris-Rex.