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A small rainbow-colored meteorite discovered in Costa Rica last year could harbor the building blocks of life.
The cosmic rock was once connected to a washing machine-sized asteroid that fell to Earth on April 23, 2019, dispersing into two villages – La Palmera and Aguas Zarcas.
The asteroid was a remnant of the early solar system, and the meteorite, called Aguas Zarcas, could be made up of complex carbon compounds.
Scientists believe it may contain complex organic compounds, as it is made up of the same dust from the early Milky Way that was found in a separate meteor that exploded over Murchison, Australia in 1969, which contained amino acids.
However, the team hopes to find proteins inside the new specimen, which has yet to be confirmed by the scientific community.
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A small rainbow-colored meteorite discovered in Costa Rica last year could harbor the building blocks of life. The cosmic rock was once connected to a washing machine-sized asteroid that fell to Earth on April 23, 2019, dispersing across two villages.
Aguas Zarcas is estimated to be 4,560 million years old and was part of an asteroid that fell at 9:09 p.m. local time over San Carlos.
A woman claims a stone ripped through her roof at the back of her house in Aguas Zarcas and says she found a ‘hot stone’ on the ground.
The rock weighed around 2.4 pounds and was analyzed in the house where it fell, using specialized equipment from the petrography and geochemistry section of the school of geology.
After studying the rock for over a year, the team named the rock Aguas Zarcas and know that it is a carbonaceous chondrite, which formed before the development of our sun.
Scientists believe it may contain complex organic compounds because it is made up of the same dust from the early Milky Way that was found in a separate meteor that exploded over Murchison, Australia in 1969 that contained amino acids.
Carbonaceous chondrites are rich in carbon – and not just annoying inorganic carbon, but also organic molecules as complex as amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, reports ScienceMag.
Scientists compared the rainbow meteor to what has been found in Australia.
Murchison’s rocks were collected by a team and sent to labs around the world for further analysis.
Collectively, the researchers found nearly 100 different amino acids in the remains of the asteroid, many of which are found in the body on Earth and others are rare or unknown in existing life.
Murchison also contained nucleobases, the building blocks of genetic molecules such as RNA, and in November 2019, researchers discovered a major component of the RNA backbone: the ribose sugar molecule.
Daniel Glavin, astrobiologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said: “ We don’t detect life itself, but the components are all there. ”
“I wouldn’t have a job without Murchison.
And the 66-pound Aguas Zarcas could turn out to contain the same compounds.
After studying the rock for over a year, the team named the rock Aguas Zarcas and know that it is a carbonaceous chondrite, which formed before the development of our sun.
In addition, the team has more advanced technology than scientists 50 years ago, allowing them to preserve and probe the rock.
Because the rainbow meteor is younger, scientists hope to find organic compounds that have long since evaporated from Murchison.
They are sure there will be a number of amino acids inside the rock, but the team also hopes to uncover proteins, which have long been suspected but never confirmed in a meteorite.
For billions of years, Aguas Zarcas had avoided such contaminating influences. If it could stay that way a little longer, scientists could retrieve information from three ancient periods, otherwise inaccessible.
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