Science News, AP, more: Those meteorites that peppered the Nubian desert two years ago carried strange cargo: Amino acids that don’t fit the Earthly paradigm
Last week I posted on the presentation at the AGU meeting of a science writing prize for coverage in 2008 of the teeny asteroid that astronomers saw coming, and that scattered its atmosphere-pummeled remnants across the desert in Sudan. That primed the brain for news that those shards of the early solar system are still revealing surprises. A stack of papers in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science lays the latest out at length from study of 2008 C3, aka the Almahatta Sitta asteroid meteorite.
Although not first out with a report, at Science News, space and astronomy writer Ron Cowen has it at more length than most. He focusses on a paper by a team of NASA and SETI Institute analysts.They discovered fragments of amino acids in that definitely are not contaminants by Earthly biology but also don’t fit the usual model for how these building blocks for peptides and for protein can form spontaneously in space.
It has to do with water, which apparently could not have been present when these alien molecules formed. That violates the standard narrative. It’s a well-done story. That is so despite one source’s assertion that, by expanding ways that AAs can form, this means life probably had significant more chances to arise than previously appreciated. Because the rise of life is such a vast unknown, and because none that evolved off-Earth is evident yet, it would seem a stretch to believe this discovery moves the needle very far when it comes to the odds of life in the universe generally.
A quote like that, it seems to me, is nest-feathering by a scientist whose interest, consciously or not, is to improve the climate for grant approval. To reporter Cowen’s credit, he immediately follows this boosterish quote with a more temperate opinion from another authority on such things.
Other Meteorite 2008 C3 stories:
- Fast Company – Kit Eaton: NASA Finds Amino Acids on Impossible Meteorite, Improves Chances E.T. exists ;
- ABC (Australia) Stuart Gary: Life’s building blocks found in meteorite ;
- Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal – Mark Johnson: Scientists study asteroid the size of a Buick that exploded over Sudan ;
Grist for the Mill: NASA-Goddard Press Release ;
- Charlie Petit
