![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/SEI_290221614-ee34.jpg\")
\n\t\tDid life come from an asteroid? Scientists have never quite ruled it out (Picture: Nazarii Neshcherenskyi)<\/p>\n
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\n\t\tDid life come from an asteroid? Scientists have never quite ruled it out (Picture: Nazarii Neshcherenskyi)<\/p>\n
DNA is much more than some weird-looking string<\/a> \u2013 it\u2019s the code to all life on Earth.<\/p>\n Your cells use it to make proteins, as do the cells of the tree in your garden, the birds roosting on it and the fruit you\u2019ve topped your granola with. <\/p>\n But Japanese scientists say they\u2019ve discovered an asteroid<\/a> zooming around our solar system with all the ingredients to make life. <\/p>\n Researchers discovered this by analysing pinches of grit collected from Ryugu, a 3,000-foot-wide space rock shaped like a spinning top, in 2018.<\/p>\n A wealth of organic molecules \u2013 including the building blocks of life<\/a> adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil \u2013 were found inside the millimetre-wide rubble. <\/p>\n The first four are present in DNA, while uracil is unique to RNA, a similar life-forming molecule that cells copy genes from DNA to. <\/p>\n \t\t Where these five ingredients come from is a mystery \u2013 solving it could mean learning how life actually formed on Earth. <\/p>\n The team wrote in a paper published in Nature Astronomy<\/a> that life may have come from primordial grey dirt like Ryuga.<\/p>\n Scientists have long suggested that everything we need to make life was already in our solar neighbourhood some 4.6 billion years ago.<\/p>\n At the time, a messy cloud of dust and ice was swirling<\/a> around the sun, which was mashed into planets and asteroids.<\/p>\n Ryugu, which is nearly 111,000,000 miles away<\/a> from Earth, formed about 5.2 million years after the birth of the solar system. <\/p>\n Exactly 5 years ago today, on February 22, 2019 at 07:29:10 JST (onboard time), Hayabusa2 made the first touchdown on asteroid Ryugu during a tense operation! The video was captured by CAM-H and lasted 5 minutes 40 seconds, starting 59s before the final descent (it’s sped up 5x) pic.twitter.com\/pCyu7sdPYQ<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 HAYABUSA2@JAXA (@haya2e_jaxa) February 22, 2024<\/a><\/p>\n The carbon-rich rock is called a carbonaceous chondrite, meaning experts think it formed in the outer part of the solar system. <\/p>\n Ryugu, in other words, is a time capsule of what materials were around billions of years ago that could have formed our planet. <\/p>\n To peek inside, the Japanese Aerospace Agency\u2019s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft flew to it to prick some samples and brought them back to Earth in 2020.<\/p>\n Did\u2026 we just discover the origin of life?<\/p>\n Jane Ollis, a medical biochemist not involved in the research, isn\u2019t so sure.<\/p>\n She told Metro that the chemicals in Ryugu are called nucleobases. <\/p>\n \u2018Nucleobases are relatively simple organic compounds that can form through basic chemistry under the right conditions,\u2019 she says. <\/p>\n \u2018We\u2019ve seen similar molecules in meteorites before, so their presence isn\u2019t entirely surprising.\u2019<\/p>\n NASA\u00a0recovered the same set of\u00a0nucleobases from an asteroid named Bennu\u00a0in 2023.<\/p>\n \t\t Compounds lurking in cosmic minerals are certainly a big deal, Ollis says, but they\u2019re only part of the picture.<\/p>\n \u2018DNA itself isn\u2019t alive, it\u2019s just a molecule,\u2019 the founder of neurotech company\u00a0SONA stresses.<\/p>\n \u2018For life to emerge, you need a highly organised system capable of storing information, replicating it reliably and maintaining itself. <\/p>\n \u2018The leap from loose chemical ingredients to a functioning, self-sustaining system is enormous and still poorly understood.\u2019<\/p>\n Ollis added: \u2018DNA on an asteroid does not mean we\u2019ve found life, or even direct evidence that life exists elsewhere.\u2019<\/p>\n \t\t It\u2019s not only biological precursors that asteroids may have delivered to Earth \u2013 water, too. <\/p>\n Four million years ago, Earth was pummeled\u00a0by so many asteroids that historians call it the late bombardment.<\/p>\n Some of these giant rocks may have had water locked inside. This even includes Ryugu, with earlier tests suggesting it was once made from ice, which melted, forming chemical reactions.<\/p>\n Some scientists have proposed that we could owe our lives \u2013 literally \u2013 to water, as life may have started in deep-sea vents. <\/p>\n Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk<\/a>.<\/p>\n For more stories like this, check our news page<\/a>.<\/p>\n Arrow Arrow Arrow \t\t\tComments \t\t\t\tAdd as preferred source \t\t\t\tNews Updates<\/p>\n Stay on top of the headlines with daily email updates.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/SEI_290252360-c5aa.jpg\")
\n\t\tRyugu, named after an underwater city in Japanese folklore, is 111,000,000 miles away (Picture: JAXA)<\/p>\n![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/SEI_290252363-b56e.jpg\")
\n\t\tSome of the Ryugu samples were only a few millimetres large (Picture: JAXA)<\/p>\n![\"In](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/PRI_175072433-09d7.jpg\")
\n\t\tHayabusa2 scraped the samples off the rock in 2019 (Picture: Reuters)<\/p>\n
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