Scientists claim to have discovered unexpected ingredients for life inside a chunk of space rock that fell on Earth over California last year.
It is an important discovery concerning the possible inventory of molecules available to the early Earth, researchers said.
Scientists led by Sandra Pizzarello, a research professor at Arizona State University, found that the Sutter's Mill meteorite, which exploded in a blazing fireball over California last year, contains organic molecules not previously found in any meteorites.
These findings suggest a far greater availability of extraterrestrial organic molecules than previously thought possible, an inventory that could indeed have been important in molecular evolution and life itself.
Coincidentally, Sutter's Mill is also the gold discovery site that led to the 1849 California Gold Rush.
Detection of the falling meteor by Doppler weather radar allowed for rapid recovery so that scientists could study for the first time a primitive meteorite with little exposure to the elements, providing the most pristine look yet at the surface of primitive asteroids.
"The analyses of meteorites never cease to surprise you... And make you wonder," said Pizzarello.
"This is a meteorite whose organics had been found altered by heat and of little appeal for bio- or prebiotic chemistry, yet, the very Solar System processes that lead to its alteration seem also to have brought about novel and complex molecules of definite prebiotic interest such as polyethers," Pizzarello said.
Pizzarello and her team hydrothermally treated fragments of the meteorite and then detected the compounds released by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.
The hydrothermal conditions of the experiments, which also mimic early Earth settings (a proximity to volcanic activity and impact craters), released a complex mixture of oxygen-rich compounds, the probable result of oxidative processes that occurred in the parent body.
They include a variety of long chain linear and branched polyethers, whose number is quite bewildering.
This addition to the inventory of organic compounds produced in extraterrestrial environments furthers the discourse of whether their delivery to the early Earth by comets and meteorites might have aided the molecular evolution that preceded the origins of life.
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
