The asteroid samples brought back by Japan’s Hayabusa2 space probe contained a total of 23 types of amino acids. These amino acids are building blocks of proteins, which are essential to life.
The studies published in journal Science and other publications said that these findings could shed further light on origins of life on Earth. Teams from Japan’s Hokkaido University and Tokyo Institute of Technology and researchers at Okayama University published two studies last week on the findings.
The samples which were recovered in late 2020 were analyzed and have been a source of curiosity for researchers across the planet. Meanwhile, the Hayabusa2 space probe is on another mission to a different asteroid.
The amino acids found on the surface of Ryugu include glutamic acid and valine. The glutamic acid is responsible for the taste of umami – umami, according to food experts and researchers, is kind of a fifth basic taste aside from sweet, sour, bitter and salty.
The finding from the Hayabusa2 probe adds to the other hypothesis which believes that amino acids may have arrived from space.
Yoshitaka Yoshimura, Tamagawa University professor, told news agency Nikkei Asia that the search for life in outer space ‘could take off on hopes that amino-acid-based organisms could exist on Mars and beyond’.
The findings are also important since some of the samples are thought to contain compounds from when they were originally formed thus shedding light on the birth of the solar system. Some of those samples were formed around 3 million years after the solar system was created, which means they were formed roughly 4.6 billion years ago, making them ‘fossils of the solar system’.
The samples collected from Ryugu are now expected to serve as a better baseline for the materials that can be found in the rest of our solar system. Samples collected from a comet contained few compounds while some meteorites may have contaminated upon contact with Earth.
Junichi Watanabe, a professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, told Nikkei Asia that if researchers can closely analyze materials that were created soon after the birth of the solar system it will give a clearer picture of what was going on back then.
(with inputs from Nikkei Asia)
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