A Japanese space probe has retrieved specks of dust from an asteroid some 300 million kilometres from Earth. The surprising content was a drop of water, scientists said Friday. Earlier analyses have suggested that life on Earth may have come from outer space, and the new discovery lends support to it.
“This drop of water has great meaning,” lead scientist Tomoki Nakamura of Tohoku University told reporters ahead of the research’s publication in the journal Science on Friday.
“Many researchers believe that water was brought (from outer space) but we actually discovered water in Ryugu, an asteroid near Earth, for the first time.”
The findings are a part of the latest research to be published from the analysis of 5.4 grammes of rocks and dust gathered by the Hayabusa-2 probe from the asteroid Ryugu.
The research says the team found a drop of fluid in the Ryugu sample “which was carbonated water containing salt and organic matter”, Nakamura said.
Hayabusa-2 was launched in 2014 on its mission to Ryugu and returned to Earth’s orbit two years ago with a capsule containing the sample. It has already yielded several insights, including organic material that showed some of the building blocks of life on Earth, amino acids, may have been formed in space.
Scientists believe that the latest revelation bolsters the theory that asteroids like Ryugu, or its larger parent asteroid, could have “provided water, which contains salt and organic matter” in collisions with Earth, Nakamura said.
“We have discovered evidence that this (process) may have been directly linked to, for example, the origin of the oceans or organic matter on Earth.” (WION)
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