Life’s Building Blocks Found on Surprising Meteorite

Life’s Building Blocks Found on Surprising Meteorite
SPACE.com

from SPACE.com Space.com Staff

space.com Wed Dec 15, 6:15 pm ET

Scientists have discovered amino acids, the building blocks of life in a meteorite where none were expected.

The finding adds evidence to the idea that some of life’s key ingredients could have formed in space, and then been delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite impacts.

The meteorite in question was born in a violent crash, and eventually crashed into northern Sudan.

“This meteorite formed when two asteroids collided,” said Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “The shock of the collision heated it to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit [1,093 degrees Celsius], hot enough that all complex organic molecules like amino acids should have been destroyed, but we found them anyway.”

Amino acids are the molecules used to build the proteins that are essential to life.

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