Earth is known as the Blue Planet because of its oceans, which cover more than 70 percent of the planet’s surface and are home to the world’s greatest diversity of life. While water is essential for life on the planet, the answers to two key questions have eluded us: where did Earth’s water come from and when? (more…)
Thanks to the generosity of three professional meteorite hunters, the UA Lunar and Planetary Laboratory will own three samples of a rare kind of meteorite leftover from the earliest beginnings of the solar system.
To the untrained eye, the black, smooth-edged lump that is sitting under a glass cover looks similar to a piece of charcoal. But to scientists Dante Lauretta and Ed Beshore from the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, it is one of the most intriguing stones they have ever seen.
“This meteorite is the oldest rock you’ll ever find on Earth. In fact, it formed 50 to 60 million years before the Earth even existed,” said Lauretta, who is a professor of planetary science and principal investigator of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which will send a spacecraft to return a sample from an asteroid in 2023. (more…)
Washington, D.C.— Meteorites hold a record of the chemicals that existed in the early Solar System and that may have been a crucial source of the organic compounds that gave rise to life on Earth. Since the 1960s, scientists have been trying to find proof that nucleobases, the building blocks of our genetic material, came to Earth on meteorites. New research, published next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicates that certain nucleobases do reach the Earth from extraterrestrial sources, by way of certain meteorites, and in greater diversity and quantity than previously thought.
Extensive research has shown that amino acids, which string together to form proteins, exist in space and have arrived on our planet piggybacked on a type of organic-rich meteorite called carbonaceous chondrites. But it has been difficult to similarly prove that the nucleobases found on meteorite samples are not due to contamination from sources on Earth. (more…)
