Building Blocks of Life Discovered on Distant Asteroid NOVA PBS

[Judi Lynn]

2. After seeing your video, found this, also concerning Bennu: "The asteroid Bennu is even weirder than we thought"

Analysis of samples brought back to Earth from the asteroid Bennu reveal that it has a bizarre chemical make-up and is unusually magnetic

By Alex Wilkins
11 March 2025



The asteroid Bennu is puzzling scientists, with samples from the space rocks showing weirder properties than they expected. These include extremely high nitrogen levels, inexplicably massive clumps of molecules essential for life and improbably magnetic properties.

Scientists have been analysing clumps of rock from Bennu since NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft returned samples from the asteroid to Earth in 2023. They quickly found these contained a plethora of the chemical building blocks for life, including particles rich in phosphorus and nitrogen-containing carbon compounds.

When Zack Gainsforth at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues looked at some of these particles more closely, using an electron microscope, they found improbably high amounts of nitrogen, including a compound containing carbon, oxygen and nitrogen with an “insane” amount of almost 20 per cent nitrogen, he says.
“If we had found this particle first, we would have chalked it up as contamination, except for the fact that we had seen another [nitrogen-rich] particle already,” says Gainsforth. He presented the findings at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Texas on 10 March.

Researchers were also surprised at the structures that some of these carbon compounds formed. Many asteroids contain nanoglobules, which are tiny, hollow blobs of carbon that can contain important other molecules within them. But in Bennu, these nanoglobules appeared to stick together to form vast structures hundreds of times larger, called macromolecules. “You could see these things with the naked eye in the microscope,” says Simon Clemett at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas. “They were massive, and so we assumed they were something else. We thought it couldn’t be just massive globules, that would be ridiculous.”

More:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2471749-the-asteroid-bennu-is-even-weirder-than-we-thought/

Or:
https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.newscientist.com/article/2471749-the-asteroid-bennu-is-even-weirder-than-we-thought/

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Thank you for the video, Uncle Joe.