Author Topic: Astonishingly old Antarctic space rock could explain mystery of life's weird asymmetry  (Read 321 times)

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Offline corbe

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Astonishingly old Antarctic space rock could explain mystery of life's weird asymmetry

By Meghan Bartels 2 hours ago


Life is asymmetrical, and a time capsule of the earliest days of the solar system may explain why.

 
An image of a piece of the Antarctic meteorite Asuka 12236 as seen through a microscope; the sample is about 0.3 inches (1 centimeter) across.
(Image: © Carnegie Institution for Science/Conel M. O'D. Alexander)

A time capsule of the earliest days of the solar system may be the first clue in explaining a long-standing puzzle for those who study life: It appears to be stubbornly asymmetrical.

The story begins in 2012, when scientists discovered a golf-ball-sized hunk of rock now known as Asuka 12236 on the icy expanses of Antarctica. Asuka 12236 wasn't just any rock, it was a space rock — and not just any space rock either. Researchers think it's a particularly old meteorite, perhaps containing material even older than our solar system, and that makes it the stuff of scientists' dreams.

"It's fun to think about how these things fall to Earth and happen to be full of all this different information about how the solar system formed, what it formed from, and how the elements built up in the galaxy," Conel M. O'D. Alexander, a meteorite scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and co-author on the new research, said in a NASA statement.

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https://www.space.com/pristine-antarctic-meteorite-amino-acid-chirality.html
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