A special rainbow-coloured meteorite found in Costa Rica may have carried building blocks for life to Earth, reports livescience.com.
On April 23, 2019, a soft space rock smacked into Costa Rica after a washing machine-sized clay fireball broke up before landing. While meteorites turn up all over Earth, these shards were special; the asteroid that spawned them was a soft remnant of the early solar system, made from the dust from the spinning nebula that would ultimately form our solar system, formed in even older stars, the report said.
Locals found shards scattered between two villages, La Palmera and Aguas Zarcas.
And the meteorites that rained down from the event — collectively called Aguas Zarcas — belong to a rare class called carbonaceous chondrites, which form in the wee hours of the solar system's emergence and are typically packed with carbon.
This particular space rock contains complex carbon compounds, likely including amino acids, which join to form proteins and DNA, and perhaps other, even more complex building blocks of life.
While other rocky chunks from the very early solar system became parts of planets, this one remained intact and changed over time only through sunlight-driven chemical reactions that spurred the creation of more and more complex chemical compounds, the report added.
An earlier meteor that exploded over Murchison of Australia in 1969 had similar features.
Amino acids discovered in its clay, Joshua Sokol reported in Science, helped spread the idea that life on Earth may have originated from chemicals delivered in meteorites. And like the Murchison meteorite, this Aguas Zarcas fragment contains dust from the ancient, earlier Milky Way, before our sun formed.
Studies of this new meteorite are still incomplete, Sokol wrote. But, researchers are excited that they can examine it using modern techniques, looking for complex organic compounds, maybe even proteins, that even if they did once exist inside the Murchison meteorite have long since disappeared, degrading in Earth's atmosphere.
Already, there's evidence of amino acids in this Aguas Zarcas fragment not found elsewhere on Earth.
Aguas Zarcas shards may offer the most pristine samples yet of the early solar system and pre-solar dust cloud. But landing as they did in the Costa Rican rainforest, Sokol reported, there's still the possibility of contamination.
