SPACE ROCKS: A fragment of the Murchison meteorite, which boasts a diverse array of organic compounds.
Image: Art Bromage via Wikimedia Commons
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Fragments of a chemically primitive meteorite that landed near Murchison, Australia, in 1969 have long been known to harbor a variety of interesting compounds, including dozens of amino acids. But as analytic techniques become more sophisticated, the Murchison meteorite continues to reveal even more diversity and complexity in the early solar system, and new work by a team of European researchers is no exception.
In the study, set to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analytical chemist Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin of the Helmholtz German Research Center for Environmental Health in Munich and his colleagues used high-resolution mass spectrometry to look at the organic (carbon-based) content of three Murchison samples. The group found more than 14,000 unique molecular compositions, or collections of atoms, in the samples; there may be 50,000 or more such compositions, if the limited scope of the mass spectrometry analysis is taken into account. And because each collection of atoms can be arranged in numerous ways, the authors estimate that there may be millions of distinct organic compounds in the meteorite.
Many researchers have analyzed the chondritic meteorite for amino acids and other possible precursors to life, because some theories hold that life on Earth began with the delivery of prebiotic organic compounds from space via asteroids or comets. Schmitt-Kopplin says that he and his colleagues took a less targeted approach to try to unlock the meteorite's full chemical complexity and, by extension, the chemical complexity of the early solar system. "What we've seen out of this is that we had such a multitude of signals as we never saw in any other sample before," he says. "Even in petroleum, you have really complex materials, but not necessarily as complex as this."
Daniel Glavin, an astrobiologist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who did not contribute to the latest study, has worked on Murchison and other meteorites to look for possible precursors to life that may have arrived on Earth from space. "I think that the issue of diversity and complexity in chemistry is something that has been known for a while with meteorites," Glavin says. "I don't think we knew it was this complex, as what they're showing."
Murchison is a popular meteorite for study partly because roughly 100 kilograms of its stony fragments were quickly collected in 1969 and so did not suffer from much terrestrial contamination. It carries the signature of the solar system from around the time of the sun's formation, roughly 4.6 billion years ago. "It really is some of the first condensates of the early solar system," Glavin says. "This stuff basically freezes a record of some of the earliest chemistry taking place in the solar system that we have access to."
Glavin and his colleagues have had similar success in applying modern analytic approaches to the Murchison meteorite in a targeted search for compounds more relevant to life, finding evidence for hundreds of amino acids. "It really shows the benefits of having these samples and keeping them around until new, more advanced techniques come about to analyze them," Glavin says.
He notes that it will take time to match specific compounds to the potentially millions of chemical species in the Murchison meteorites. "It's exciting, but it also scares me at the same time," Glavin says. "We have a lot of work to do to even pretend to understand what this stuff is."
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14 Comments
Add CommentSee the quotes from several sceptics to related claims in 2000:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/generalscience/murchison_metor_000221.html
"Murchison meteorites are even more likely than most to have experienced contamination since they fell in a farmyard and, reputedly, at least some of the stones had to be recovered from a ditch filled with manure"...
How can we be sure the Murchison meteorite wasn't originally blasted from Earth into space? Surely impacts such as that at Chicxulub send some debris back into space where it can reach the moon or other planets or return here as meteorites.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thismpainesyd – Wow, that a quote from a true skeptic, inferring that it (all of the recovered fragments?) may have landed on a cow pie! As I understand, the fragments were found over a 13 square kilometer area, which would make it the biggest cow pie ever reported. This meteorite was observed to fall, so its exposure time on Earth is determinable.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have no opinion on this topic, but wikipedia details a number of their organic compounds’ characteristics that indicate a non-terrestrial origin. This classification of meteorites are distinguished by their relatively high amounts of water, which can help explain the development of organic compounds, and contrasts with more common classes which do not contain much water or organic compounds. They are also referred to as some of the most primitive meteorites, which I presume refers to their tested age.
My question for the life from space fans is: since these meteorites may have developed organic compounds as a result of their relatively high volume of water, couldn’t the cooling early Earth, containing at least some water, have independently also developed organic compounds? As mentioned by kennethroger above, they could have originated from an early planet like the Earth.
Even the farthest reaches of the universe we've been able to observe have been found via spectrum analysis to be full of giant quantities of organic compounds. This comes as no surprise.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA surprise would be to find a hyper-intelligent algae bloom alive and well in the oceans of our solar systems moons, or life forms in the turbulence of jupiters storms.
Any of these possibilities are more plausible than not.
It was either Watson or Crick, think it was Watson who felt DNA was too complex to have evolved as quickly as it did and was seeded here by aliens from the center of the galaxy, who knows. Seeing how things are done here now though, if we tried a similar stunt I wouldn't be surprised to see the ETs call up a fumigator.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://healthjournalclub.blogspot.com/
If you have ever read about Fischer-Tropsch reactions (gas + electricity), it is not surprising that stoney meteorites have organic compounds - including amino acids. This one is a "fall" not a "find".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMurchison is a very remote dry part of Western Australia so the chances 100 pieces of the meteorite landed in the "chook" house does bring out the sceptic in me. It has no town, 29 stations (ranches) and 160 people. I'm not even sure there are any chickens out there as they would have to cope with the summer heat.
That is another Murchison, Mark. The meteor landed near Murchison, central Victoria, which is not particularly remote.In fact, I am pretty certain I saw the fireball high in the atmosphere that night in 1969... however, my parents didn't believe it at the time!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSee this article http://www.tastethecloud.com/content/water-creator-life that describes water as having the intrinsic properties to create complex organic molecules.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere is an article http://www.tastethecloud.com/content/water-creator-life that describes water as having the intrinsic properties required to create complex organic molecules.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSee the link to the Space.com article. It quotes several experts on the contamination of meteorite samples. The scepticism at the time was about claims of fossilised bacteria but the point was made that it would be very difficult to separate amino acids that came from Earth contamination. The latest work may have some way of doing this.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy have we interest outside our body inside our awareness is quite task.Some had said MEDITATION is only way,Why haven't you try just only time you have to pay.NIRVANA.....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thismpainesyd - Thanks. The wikipedia entry discusses the specific characteristic properties of the organic compounds they (whoever) determine to indicate their extraterrestrial origin. I can't assess this - see:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murchison_meteorite
They do point out that, while most meteorites have been lying around for some unknown period of time, since the Murchison meteorite was observed entering the atmosphere and retrieved fairly quickly, its potential for contamination is reduced, and can be better assessed.
I suspect that the precursors of life could have independently developed on Earth, even if even if extraterrestrial sources provided some contribution.
there's always -they have to originally originate somewhere. i don't think it's at all necessary to have meteoric samples to seed. but maybe there was a huge amount of these FISCHER-TROPFF COMPOUNDS from the sky. that would really light things up.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEven landing in 'Cow Pies', how would all these compounds find their way to center of the rock? I really find the species, Homo Sapien, to be extremely arrogant, believing WE are the ' be-all' and 'end-all' in the Universe! Of course there are molecules of 'Life' all through the Universe. I think we'll find 'ET' out there, soon, whatever shape it comes in. ( Cow pies??)
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