Education Freestyle

cited: New York Times

Scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, MD) revealed that, for the first time, the building blocks of life as we know it were found on a comet. They found animo acid glycine, the forerunners of protein, on pieces of comet brought back from the 2006 probe, Stardust. This discovery goes further to proving the modern theory that many of the original ingredients for life on Earth showered down when asteroids (space rocks orbiting the solar system in a belt) and comets (conglomorate hunks of dirt and ice that form past Neptune) collided with the surface.

“It tells us more about the inventory of organics in the early solar system,” said Jamie Elsila, an astrochemist at Goddard who led the research.

Amino acids are small molecules that, when strung together into chains, form a diversity of proteins. For four decades, scientists have found a multitude of amino acids in some meteorites, the bits of asteroids that land on Earth. More recently, astronomers reported that amino acids might float throughout the cosmos, a belief resulting from their detection of the color signatures of glycine, the simplest of the amino acids, in distant interstellar gas clouds.

Some doubts remain about that claim, but if it is true, it would then not be surprising that when the clouds condense into stars and planets, the building blocks of life might be readily available there.

As for our solar system, meteorite data show that amino acids are present in its inner neighborhood, where asteroids orbit, but until now nothing has been known for certain about what might have formed farther out, where comets gather.

But on Jan. 2, 2004, the Stardust spacecraft flew through the tail of dust and gas of the comet Wild 2 (pronounced vilt two). Two years later, the probe returned to Earth, sending collected samples to the ground by parachute for scientists to analyze. Comets are thought to preserve material of the early solar system, largely unchanged for the last 4.5 billion years.

Within a few months, the Goddard scientists found glycine embedded in aluminum foil of the collecting apparatus. They had spent the time since then confirming that the glycine indeed came from the comet and not from contamination.

“It’s not necessarily particularly surprising,” Dr. Elsila said of her extraterrestrial glycine in a phone conversation Tuesday. “I would have been surprised if it wasn’t there.”

Dr. Elsila and her colleagues were able to show that the glycine from the comet had heavier quantities of the isotope carbon 13 than what occurs on Earth. They also detected a second amino acid, beta-alanine, but the quantities were too minuscule to confirm.

The findings were presented Sunday at a Washington meeting of the American Chemical Society and will be published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

Donald E. Brownlee, a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington and principal investigator of the Stardust mission, said the discovery indicated that the chemical reactions that produce glycine, and presumably other amino acids, occurred throughout the early solar system.

“That means production of amino acids is fairly common,” Dr. Brownlee said, although this is far from a foregone conclusion. Other scientists suggest that the warm and wet conditions that were in early asteroids may have been the breeding ground for the chemical reaction- conditions which were not found in comets.

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My Take: Well, we’ve getting closer and closer to calling up our neighbors on Mars and inviting them over for a potluck. Why is the world not more shocked by this news? The researchers themselves seem positively stoic, as opposed to the champagne-popping, I-was-right celebration that I would have assumed they’d throw.

All I know is,  every day it goes to show that the future really is upon us. I can’t wait for my flying car.

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