[meteorite-list] Allende Meteorite Reveals Signs of Life from Space

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:22:42 2004
Message-ID: <200306261602.JAA04957_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/afp/20030623/meteorite.html

Meteorite Reveals Signs of Life from Space
By Danny Kingsley
Discovery Channel News
June 26, 2003

Unique carbon building blocks of life called fullerenes did indeed
crash to Earth in meteorites, new British research has found.

The work by Peter Harris from Reading University has provided the
first direct evidence of fullerenes - a special
type of carbon molecule associated with the
origins of life - in meteorite
samples. The analysis of samples from the
Allende meteorite which fell on Mexico in
1969 is published this week online in the
Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Fullerenes are a type of carbon molecule first
discovered in the mid-1980s, the most famous of
which is the buckyball, which is a closed spherical
molecule the shape of a soccer ball. The fullerenes
discovered by Harris and colleagues were completely
closed and relatively large, containing around 6,000 to
10,000 carbon atoms each, and with a generally
disordered structure.

Since the Allende meteorite has been shown to have
formed at the same time as our solar system's
planets, the findings, which show fullerenes are
capable of surviving for billions of years in space,
provide a further step towards understanding where
life came from.

"One possibility for where the organic building blocks
for life came from is that they came from space," said
Dr Jeremy Bailey from the Anglo Australian
Observatory in Sydney. "Not so much that life itself
came from space, but the organic molecules that you
need to make the primordial soup could have come from
space."

"It's certainly an interesting result, but not a
surprising one," Bailey told ABC Science Online.
"People have generally believed there are fullerenes
in space and it's not surprising that you find them in
these meteorites because there are plenty of other
organic molecules in the meteorites."

The findings also support previous claims by
astrobiologist Luann Becker at the University
of Washington in Seattle, that fullerenes were present
in carbonaceous material from meteorites. Her work was
considered controversial because of methods she used to
identify the fullerenes - laser desorption mass
spectroscopy - could have modified the carbon samples,
creating the fullerene compounds it was supposed to be
finding.
Received on Thu 26 Jun 2003 12:02:47 PM PDT