[Rockhounds] SWEET! SUGARS FOUND IN METEORITES FOR THE FIRST TIME

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

If you had to list the very basic elemental ingredients for life on Earth,
you'd have to include carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen (collectively
called CHON) as your main ones, plus a smattering of others like
phosphorous, sodium, and iron. If you took a step up in complexity and
included molecules, then you'd also want things like amino acids (the
building blocks of proteins), nucleobases (the building blocks of nucleic
acids like RNA and DNA), and sugars.

A lot of these chemicals are pretty simple, and form easily in the right
conditions. Conditions on early Earth may have been conducive to construct
them, but it may surprise you to find out things were pretty good in space,
too. The very first solid bits of material to form in the disk of gas and
dust swirling around the proto-Sun 4.6 billion years ago were rich in
carbon and those other ingredients, even the complex ones.

And many of them have actually been found in meteorites! Amino acids,
nucleobases <https://www.pnas.org/content/108/34/13995>, and other
relatively complex molecules have been found in rocks that fell from space,
ones that had been orbiting the Sun for tall those eons since they formed.
Weirdly, though, one of the major ingredients has historically not been
found: sugars, specifically the kind life is based on.

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/sweet-sugars-found-in-meteorites-for-the-first-time