Sugars, Gum, Stardust Found in NASA's Asteroid Bennu Samples | Hacker News Reader

Sugars, Gum, Stardust Found in NASA's Asteroid Bennu Samples

nasa.gov

134 pointsjnord55 comments

> … gum-like material […] was likely formed in the early days of the solar system

> … consists of polymer-like materials extremely rich in nitrogen and oxygen.

Asteroids sound delicious!

Come to think of it, quite a lot of sugary treats have space-themed names. Milky Way, Mars, Starburst, Orbit gum... I'm sure there are others.

"Galaxy" (in the UK) is the obvious one. Incidentally, Mars bars were named after the Mars family who owned the company that made them, not the planet.

And where did the family name originate?

Same place that the family did.

Is this a yo mama joke?

Women are from Venus

With the battle-axe, sir, with the battle-axe!

i always wanted to chew some asteroid

The title probably wants the original quotes put back in

Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff!

An eternal classic, brother, well done!

I know one theory proposes comets seeded earth with essential materials. But what seeded comets?? It’s just chance with extra steps, no?

The big bang did. And following it, supernovae. But there's a lot we don't know and science is always advancing!

For example, JWST observed early galaxies are both larger and more diverse materials than we expected. Means there's something new to learn!

When Carl Sagan said, "The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself" he was poetically accurate. The comets are seeded with the remains of untold countless exploded stars.

There's a theory that at the very beginnings of the universe, as it cooled down, there was a period where the average temperature of the universe was between 0-100º C, meaning the whole universe was within a "habitable" temperature range, and this could have supercharged the creation of the building blocks of life. I think I learned about it on a Veritasium video... Maybe someone knows which one? :)

Veritasium videos are often extremely misleading. In this case the cooling universe lacked carbon for these organic compounds. Life cares about 0-100c because of water which depends on Oxygen would be missing etc.

Just as example in one video he refers to the field outside of the wire carrying the energy for electricity, however EM waves propagate at the speed of light and fall off at the square of distance. Electricity can travel thousands of miles without that kind of falloff but doesn’t propagate as fast because it’s electron density in the wires that causes what we think of as electricity. He then setups up an antenna and … well you get the idea.

A "habitable" temperature range, without water and carbon, would be entirely meaningless.

God

Wait till you hear about God!

God is just an extra step. If you assume god existed forever and nobody created her, then why not just accept that the universe existed forever and cut out the middle-deity.

>created her

Did you mean 'them' ?

idk, what does god need with a pronoun anyway?

It's sorting and mixing. Comets, asteroids, and planets all had different factors governing their formation (sorting). When comets or asteroids hit planets, you get a mixture of those different compositions.

Big claims. Solid names.

"“All five nucleobases used to construct both DNA and RNA, along with phosphates, have already been found in the Bennu samples brought to Earth by OSIRIS-REx,” said Furukawa. “The new discovery of ribose means that all of the components to form the molecule RNA are present in Bennu.”"

Let's hope it is not a contamination.

Aren't we starting to figure out that life (self-organization) is the most likely outcome for planets with our conditions? Maybe "our conditions" are also too strong of a requirement

Check out Blaise Arcas on MLST and Nick Land on Dwarkesh. Self organization might just be the second law of thermodynamics in action

Yeah or Mike Levin

https://youtu.be/5MQq4n2QrNw?si=a7gFLLgQL1Soq0mt

"planets with our conditions" is doing a lot of work here.

how many planets meet that criteria? most of the closest have typcially been labeled "super Earths" so their gravity will be greater than 1g. what effect will that have?

If life has adapted to the crushing pressure of deep ocean, I have hopes that it can adapt to not-so-crushing gravity. I'm sure a lot of our current life could adapt if our gavity was doubled. I'd feel sorry for birds, though.

Can trees pull water up to the top in >1g situations? At >1g, the deep ocean pressure would be that much more.

Quick googling tells me that trees move water internally by capillarity, and suction caused by leave evaporation, both processes passive.

This puts limits on how high the column of water can be raised, yet at 1g we can have monstrous trees like sequoias, so maybe many kinds of trees would die, but the survivors would just grow shorter.

Abisal creatures, who knows how much pressure they can adapt to? They have populated our oceans as deep as they can go, the planet has nothing stronger to challenge them.

you're focusing on sea dwelling creatures. what about land based? would animals get as large? would more calories need to be consumed for the extra effort necessary to move around in what ever >1g is around? some of these are are between 1.9x and 10x the size of earth. working twice as hard every day for everything be one thing, but 10x the effort?

what would be the atmospheric pressure at >1g? what effect would that play as well? not only would you be heavier, but you'd have to work harder to breathe.

again, lots of questions about the these differences that make it a lot more complicated than the right amino acids floating around in space.

Woah, I'm not focusing on anything specific, I just tried to address the two observations of your previous comment. If you keep adding more we'll never end this tread.

It's not like I am a SuperEarther cultist or something, I just think life can adapt to a wider range of gravities. If you think about it, it's amazing that Earth life can withstand constant microgravity despite no evolutionary pressure in that direction. If microgravity is survivable, why not some degree of macrogravity?

Bennu is just the perfect brand name for space gummy bears

Space gummy tardigrades (because they can survive in space and their nickname is "water bear")!

As I’ve been reading findings of extraterrestrial organic molecules recently, I wonder: do we know there was no contamination?

I’m going to be sad if it turns out someone sneezed into it and was afraid to tell their manager.

I think the article does a good job clarifying in simple words those questions risen by the slightly click-baity title.

>”Once soft and flexible, but since hardened, this ancient “space gum” consists of polymer-like materials extremely rich in nitrogen and oxygen. Such complex molecules could have provided some of the chemical precursors that helped trigger life on Earth”

That would be some stale big league chew if that were the case. By orders of billions of years. Making it the oldest wad of big league chew we know of in existence. ;)

I'm almost certain that the gum in baseball cards originated from the big bang.

Not the Big Bang, the Big Ban.

The ban of smoking or tobacco products on TV. Up until the 1980s, it was common to see a pitcher up there with a mouth full of Kodiak or Chaw. Spitting their nasty tobacco-stained split all over the mound.

"I will assume that the experts involved have not taken any reasonable precautions, and learned nothing from the past 60 years of acquired experience in space exploration. I will then ask other non-experts in the field if the experts are minimally competent or not."

I was thinking the same as parent while reading this. Mentally this activates the same thinking as on those medical tests with a high false positive rate and low incidence, so that most positives are false. I'd like to see in the article how they rule this out. Ideally I'd like to hear that they have measures in place that would allow accidental lapses in isolation to fail and they'd still be able to tell that it was Earth contamination. It's a reasonable concern and having it addressed (with something more satisfying than "they're experts, duh!") makes this kind of finding all the more interesting.

I mean, it's a concern, but there are numerous other odd things in the findings that would not be caused by ground contamination such as the amount of stardust contained in these samples versus other asteroid samples, or the huge amounts of clay/water created minerals found so far.

There are plenty of other articles on the isolation procedures they've taken so far to this point including putting off opening the container for months because of a stripped screw.

Spot on.

"I'm just asking questions".

There are papers covering contamination prevention and detection for every stage of the mission. There are papers with the designs and intentions before launch and papers with how well it went and their specific findings after return.

Here is one sick paper covering some of the clean rooms https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20230005897

Awesome -- dozens of the top people in their fields have been working on the contamination problem and publishing about it for almost two decades.

    The curation team was integrated with mission design and operations from the beginning,
    as early as 2004 (section 3.0). That integration allowed curation-specific needs such as
    contamination knowledge to be incorporated into the mission design early, when adjustments had
    minimal cost impact. Not only did this early integration inform planning for sample
    characterization, cataloging, allocation, and the development of detailed sample handling and
    containment approaches; it was also an investment in the longer term needs of the community.
    Here we describe these preparations for OSIRIS-REx, as a reference for sample scientists and
    curators and as a model for future sample return missions.

Most organic molecules are different from it's mirrored version, and living thing usually produce only one version. But inorganic reactions produce an even mix of 50% and 50%. So in most cases it's easy to spot.

Also, some sugars or amino acids are very common here and others very rare, and the commet probably has another mix.

Also, the ammount of isotopes of the atoms (like Carbon 14) is probably different.

So they found some sticky unidentified alien slime on an asteroid... This sounds like something straight out of an alien movie.

Who doesn't like sugars and gum? It's the perfect alien incubation delivery mechanism! I wonder which will be the first scientist to get their chest popped...

sugars,gum, and stardust? so like, somehow,teenage girls have been getting off the planet and hanging around in space and leaving a mess behind, bet it has that wierd artificial cotton candy smell

It figures. The universe is held together by bubble gum and strings.

the fact it is called string theory suggests it's just an idea and not known

So it's made of extraterrestrial bubblegum, got it.

What, sugars and gum, but no sandwich wrappers?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com