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Space

Water Found In Asteroid Dust May Offer Clues To Origins of Life On Earth (theguardian.com) 29

Posted by BeauHD from the surprise-findings dept.
Specks of dust that a Japanese space probe retrieved from an asteroid about 186 million miles (300m kilometers) from Earth have revealed a surprising component: a drop of water. The discovery offers new support for the theory that life on Earth may have been seeded from outer space. The Guardian reports: The findings are in the latest research to be published from analysis of 5.4 grammes of stones and dust that the Hayabusa-2 probe gathered from the asteroid Ryugu. "This drop of water has great meaning," the lead scientist, Tomoki Nakamura of Tohoku University, told reporters before publication of the research in the journal Science on Friday. "Many researchers believe that water was brought [from outer space], but we actually discovered water in Ryugu, an asteroid near Earth, for the first time."

Hayabusa-2 was launched in 2014 on its mission to Ryugu, and returned to Earth's orbit two years ago to drop off a capsule containing the sample. The precious cargo has already yielded several insights, including organic material that showed some of the building blocks of life on Earth, amino acids, may have been formed in space. The team's latest discovery was a drop of fluid in the Ryugu sample "which was carbonated water containing salt and organic matter," Nakamura said. That bolsters the theory that asteroids such as Ryugu, or its larger parent asteroid, could have "provided water, which contains salt and organic matter" in collisions with Earth, he said. "We have discovered evidence that this may have been directly linked to, for example, the origin of the oceans or organic matter on Earth." "The fact that water was discovered in the sample itself is surprising," given its fragility and the chances of it being destroyed in outer space, said Kensei Kobayashi, an astrobiology expert and professor emeritus at Yokohama National University. "It does suggest that the asteroid contained water, in the form of fluid and not just ice, and organic matter may have been generated in that water."
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Water Found In Asteroid Dust May Offer Clues To Origins of Life On Earth More

Water Found In Asteroid Dust May Offer Clues To Origins of Life On Earth

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  • Congratulations (Score:5)

    by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Friday September 23, 2022 @06:38AM (#62907129) Homepage Journal

    Congrats to JAXA. Hayabusa 2 was been an incredible success, and is now extending its mission with more asteroid visits since it has nearly half its propellant left.

    The mission landed three rovers on an asteroid, the first time it's been done. The first photos from the surface of an asteroid. And now this amazing sample return result. Absolutely amazing work.

  • Is it possible to read more about it somewhere?

  • It's reasonable to believe that spores can survive interstellar journeys, if they are encased in enough mass. We know they can survive significant radiation exposure, but it's better if they don't have to... Water would certainly help, though, because it protects whatever's in it from getting any hotter than boiling, which could help it to survive re-entry.

    • Re:Water is great, but not necessary (Score:5, Interesting)

      by RockDoctor ( 15477 ) on Friday September 23, 2022 @09:11AM (#62907313) Journal
      The necessary amount of mass is several metres thickness - to reduce the radiation levels to those at the Earth's surface. Whether that is low enough to reduce the level of damage sufficiently for a microbe (or "spore") to survive the multiple millions of years of transit time is an open question.

      Water would certainly help, though, because it protects whatever's in it from getting any hotter than boiling

      That's an unnecessary point. On those occasions that meteorites have been found within minutes of landing, they''re typically described as being cold to the touch - despite also having a "fusion crust". Rocky meteorites are not terribly good heat conductors (you're not going to propose microbes in the cores of partly melted asteroids are you?). Smaller meteors which disintegrate before reaching the ground probably expose their entire interiors to incandescent temperatures, which would be a sizzling end to millions of years of inactivity in interstellar space.

      Panspermia - the idea that life arrived on Earth from interstellar space instead of developing here - isn't impossible. But it's faced with so many low-probability events to get from [wherever it originated] to [Earth] that it's less probable (IMO) than the development of life on Earth.

      Panspermia also has the logical problem that it rejects the possibility of working out the conditions under which that life originated before the panspermia sequence happened, whereas the option that life originated on Earth is open to investigation of the conditions on early Earth, where life is thought to have originated. There are very good reasons that serious researchers into the origin(s) of life concentrate on terrestrial origins, not panspermia origin theories.

      I'll grant that panspermia is relatively popular in SF stories. So what? The boring hard science story is much more likely to be true.

      • I don't have a dog in this fight, I'm not married to either idea. The only point I want to make is that either remains possible, so we can't assume one or the other.

      • Panspermia allows for the excuse that you can't investigate further, at least not in the near term. Saves a lot of work. Whereas if you've got a theory about how amino acids originated on earth then someone's going to say "go apply for a grant, run some experiments, buy some deap sea research vessels, and attempt prove it." Arm waving is so much simpler.

        Panspermia also answers the conundrum of why all the extraterrestrials in the movies and tv look like humans with prosthetics.

        • buy some deap sea research vessels,

          Why?

          The biology around present-day "black smokers" (and "white smokers", typically lower temperature and higher pH fluids, and further from active magmatism) is interesting, I'll grant. But of only barely minimal relevance to the likely conditions of O(s)OL. You're as well off looking at the preserved structure of the plumbing in mineral deposits that formed at a "smoker" X hundreds of millions of years ago, and which are now exposed on the surface under (for an example)

  • Like who the fuck cares, honestly?

    Religious agendas aside, if so-called intelligent design theory can be shot down for simply pushing the question of the origin of life back one level, then why can't this?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Calydor ( 739835 )

      I personally feel that the concept of panspermia - life starting in outer space and coming to Earth - is nothing more than a curiosity. It just pushes the actual question out a step: How did life start? Alright, fine, it didn't start on Earth, but it still had to start somewhere, and now we know even less about the potential circumstances necessary.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )

        The only merit it may have at some point in the future is that if life does exist elsewhere, it might be found to exhibit similar characteristics that are more readily explained by a common origin than by coincidence.

        Until we discover life on another world, however, it has no place anywhere outside of science fiction (where writers can arguably use it to justify how or why different alien races might have certain similarities that are logistically improbable without some kind of common origin)

      • What you say is true, if life started somewhere out in space or on another planet it just makes it that much harder to figure out life's origin. But scientists must follow where the evidence leads them and this question is up in the air. I mildly like panspermia over earthly origins because 750k years, or whatever after the earth cooled, seems too short for the development of DNA. Curious to see if water is found routinely on other asteroids. Kudos to the team.

        • because 750k years, or whatever after the earth cooled, seems too short for the development of DNA.

          Why? Other than seems.

  • If life was seeded from elsewhere, the question is still how did life begin, anywhere. All this does is tell us it's turtles all the way down.

  • The discovery offers new support for the theory that life on Earth may have been seeded from outer space.

    It supports no such thing. Water cannot beget life. Water *plus* certain chemicals may.

    Many researchers believe that water was brought [from outer space], but we actually discovered water in Ryugu, an asteroid near Earth, for the first time.

    Every goddamn atom of the Earth came from outer space and it was a long long time between the accumulation of water and life's appearance.

  • This paper says nothing about theories about the origin of life. It is about the origin of water on earth which is essential for life as we know it. That asteroids are the source of water on Earth isn't even a new theory, it's been around since the 1960s, to explain how a boiling hot, radioactive ball of rock quickly acquired large liquid oceans. And pretty much everyone believes it now. It has also been known for decades that minerals found in meteorites, like Olivine, contain bound water in the form of h

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