All five 'seeds of life' found on asteroid in stunning clue to how life began on Earth

Scientists analysing dust from an asteroid have found all the key building blocks needed to create us and all other life on the planet Earth. A Japanese mission found that material collected from the space rock Ryugu, some 200 million miles away, contains all five chemical 'letters' — or nucleobases — that make up the DNA and RNA in every living thing on our world . The samples were collected by Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft in 2018-19 and parachuted back to Earth in December 2020.

Because asteroids like Ryugu formed around 4.6 billion years ago, when the solar system was just getting started, they’re seen as time capsules of ancient chemistry. Finding the full set of genetic building blocks - adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil - in this primordial rubble strengthens the idea that the raw ingredients for life were widespread, and that some of them may have arrived on young Earth via falling asteroids. Odds of NASA astronauts returning from Moon, AI turning us all into a brainless army, the North Sea asteroid, and why you should be grateful to have an appendix - all this and more in our latest weird science newsletter DNA acts as the long-term, stable, storage blueprint for an organism's genetic information, while RNA is a versatile, temporary helper that reads and executes those instructions to build proteins.

Both are essetial for all known forms of life. Ryugu has a different 'mix' compared with other space rocks and meteorites studied before, pointing to varied chemical histories across the solar system, according to a study published in Nature Astronomy. The findings push back the 'origin' of life’s chemistry to before Earth finished forming, showing that space was already brewing the right molecules.

It supports the idea that asteroids helped seed our planet with complex organics, giving primitive Earth a head start, and that the key ingredients aren’t rare one-offs but are instead widely scattered throughout the solar system. The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 briefly touched down on Ryugu twice, firing a projectile to stir up material and capture pristine grains and dust. Returning samples straight from the asteroid reduces the risk of Earthly contamination compared with meteorites that land here and sit in soil or water.

Lab teams are continuing to examine more grains from Ryugu before comparing them with NASA-returned samples from asteroid Bennu.