Researchers say such molecules have never before been documented in meteorites

Sep 10, 2013 06:50 GMT  ·  By
Researchers analyzing the Sutter's Mill meteorite announce the discovery of rare organic molecules
   Researchers analyzing the Sutter's Mill meteorite announce the discovery of rare organic molecules

A meteorite that landed in California on April 22, 2012 packed quite a lot of rare organic molecules, researchers claim.

What they mean is that the organic molecules found in the remains of this space rock, dubbed the Sutter's Mill meteorite, have never before been documented in other celestial bodies of its kind.

In order to pin down the chemical makeup of the space rock, the researchers first made use of solvents.

Thus, they exposed its fragments to compounds typically used to analyze the chemical makeup of space rocks, and waited to see how the chunks of meteorite responded to them.

By the looks of it, this method yielded fairly unimpressive results, meaning that the meteorite did not let out all that many dissolvable organic compounds.

It was when the researchers exposed the space rock to an environment that mimicked the conditions believed to have existed on Earth at the time when life first emerged that things really got interesting.

According to Space, these conditions, which were fairly similar to the ones still identifiable inside hydrothermal vents, caused the meteorite to let out organic compounds that scientists say have never before been found inside a space rock.

The researchers who worked on this project explain that, in light of these findings, it is safe to assume that meteorites pack and transport to planetary environments far more organic compounds than previously believed.

What's more, they say that their findings add support to the theory that life on Earth came into being courtesy of space rocks that transported key ingredients to our planet.

“The data suggest a far larger availability of meteoritic organic materials for planetary environments than previously assumed and that molecular evolution on the early Earth could have benefited from accretion of carbonaceous meteorites both directly with soluble compounds and, for a more protracted time, through alteration, processing, and release from their insoluble organic materials,” the researchers write in the Abstract to their paper.

A detailed account of this investigation and its findings was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on September 9.