Dust from asteroid Bennu is revealing a surprising origin story for life’s building blocks. New research suggests some amino acids formed in frozen ice exposed to radiation, not warm liquid water as ...

Did the ingredients for life as we know it exist in the early solar system? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of ...

Penn State researchers think a key ingredient for life may have formed in deep freeze, not in a warm asteroid puddle. Scientists at Penn State; led by geoscientist Allison Baczynski and postdoctoral ...

Amino acids, the building blocks necessary for life, were previously found in samples of 4.6-billion-year-old rocks from an asteroid called Bennu, delivered to Earth in 2023 by NASA's OSIRIS-REx ...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft didn’t just collect rocks from asteroid Bennu — it brought back samples that are rewriting our understanding of the early solar system. Scientists found unexpected ...

Asteroid Bennu was expected to be relatively smooth and easy to sample. When OSIRIS-REx arrived, it found a surface covered almost entirely in massive boulders. Safe landing zones shrank to areas no ...

NASA revealed that scientists discovered sugars that are “essential” to life and a “gum-like” substance on the space rock Bennu NASA/Goddard/University of ...

Talk about a sugar rush! NASA may have just come a little closer to cracking one of science’s most enduring mysteries — how life on Earth got started. The space agency has reportedly discovered ...

Researchers discovered sugars essential for biology, including glucose, in the asteroid material for the first time. A strange, pliable substance nicknamed "space gum" was also found, which could have ...

Alfredo has a PhD in Astrophysics and a Master's in Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces from Imperial College London. Alfredo has a PhD in Astrophysics and a Master's in Quantum Fields and ...

Researchers discovered sugars essential for biology, including glucose, in the asteroid material for the first time. A strange, pliable substance nicknamed "space gum" was also found, which could have ...

The Bennu asteroid, a space rock not too far from Earth that is rich in carbon, continues to be a trove of information for scientists keen to learn about how life may have begun in our solar system.