NASA just unveiled a set of findings that scientists say sharpen the case for how life’s ingredients form and spread through the cosmos. Together, researchers say, these discoveries make the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe more realistic than ever.
The results come from pristine material collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which grabbed a chunk of the asteroid Bennu in 2020 and delivered it to Earth in 2023. While attention recently shifted to the mysterious comet-asteroid 3I/ATLAS and its alien-probe speculation, Bennu just resurfaced with a scientific haymaker.
The 500-meter near-Earth asteroid was once flagged as one of the most dangerous known objects, with a small chance of hitting Earth in the late 2100s. But its real value lies in its chemistry. Bennu is a 4.5-billion-year-old time capsule from the earliest days of the solar system, and its samples are now rewriting what we thought we knew about life’s origins.
A team led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University found six types of sugars in the sample, including ribose, which forms the backbone of RNA, and glucose, a vital energy source for living organisms. This is the first confirmed detection of glucose in untouched asteroid material.
Another study, led by Scott Sandford of NASA Ames and Zack Gainsforth of UC Berkeley, identified a strange gum-like compound never before seen in a space rock. Researchers believe it formed early in Bennu’s parent body as it warmed, potentially setting the stage for more complex organic chemistry that eventually seeded Earth.
A third paper, led by NASA’s Ann Nguyen, discovered a stunning amount of supernova-forged dust in the samples. Bennu contained six times more presolar grains than any other known asteroid specimen, suggesting its parent body formed in a region of the young solar system flooded with the remnants of dying stars.
New space research ramps up possibility of alien life
According to OSIRIS-REx Co-Investigator Daniel Glavin, these findings make the case for alien life stronger, not because Bennu shows signs of biology, but because it proves the building blocks of life were everywhere.
“These building blocks were distributed from the outer solar system all the way to the inner solar system,” Glavin said. “They were ubiquitous. That makes me more optimistic that these ingredients could have enabled life on Earth, but also potentially elsewhere – Mars, Europa, the outer solar system.”
Interestingly, scientists did not find deoxyribose, the sugar used in DNA. Instead, the presence of ribose supports the “RNA world” hypothesis, which proposes that life began with simple RNA molecules before DNA evolved.
“Maybe the origin of life was just a single strand of RNA,” Glavin said.
The bigger picture is clear. Bennu’s chemistry reinforces the idea that asteroids played a massive role in delivering life’s raw ingredients to early Earth long before it became habitable.
“I’m becoming much more optimistic that we may be able to find life beyond Earth, even in our own solar system,” Glavin added.
This also follows NASA’s announcement earlier this year that it found the “clearest sign” of ancient life on Mars. With discoveries piling up, the question is shifting from whether aliens exist to how soon we might actually find them.
