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Meteorite Contains Complex Organic Molecules
An anonymous reader writes "Previously unknown organic molecules have been discovered in a 100 kg meteorite that hit Australia in 1969, suggesting that our early Solar System contained a soup of highly complex organic chemistry long before life appeared. Quoting: 'According to [the study's lead author], the newly discovered compounds in the Murchison meteorite "may have contributed to the organic complexity of the early 'soup' that led to the development of life on Earth." The findings also suggest that extraterrestrial chemical diversity surpasses that found on Earth. The meteor probably passed through primordial clouds in the early solar system, accumulating organic molecules in a snowball effect along the way. By tracing the sequence of organic molecules in the meteorite, researchers believe they may also be able to create a timeline for their formation and alteration since the early days of our solar system.'"
welcome our new meteor-dwelling overlords.
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Before we get all excited about finding "organic" material in space rocks, it's important to remember that organic doesn't really mean anything unless it is certified by the government. There is a battery of tests and criteria that must be passed before anything can truly be referred to as organic.
I doubt anyone has certified a ROCK from OUTER SPACE as anything but a space rock. You can't eat it anyway, so there really isn't any reason to get it certified organic.
A passing space cruise liner flushing passenger waste as it passed our primordial solar system injected the base complex organic molecules needed to form life on our planet.
The Murchison meteorite contains complex organic molecules – including carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulphur.
Molecules do not work that way!
TFA is short on details.
Again, TFA: Now, for the first time, scientists have used advanced analytical methods to conduct a non-targeted experiment....wtf?
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Looking at better news sources, one finds the scientists found over 14,000 organic compounds which contained (besides carbon), the hydrogen, sulfur, nitrogen, etc. None of those things by themselves constitutes an organic substance. Do kids even study chemistry in high school anymore?
I tried to explain on another website how this means life may have come to earth from space, and the only response I got was someone pointing out how I'm an idiot because this meteor is only from 40 years ago. He must be right, given no one would call someone an idiot when he himself is the idiot, so I must inform all of you panspermia is wrong and you should be ashamed of yourselves for believing it.
My webcomic
"The Murchison meteorite landed near a town of the same name... "
What are the odds for THAT happening?!
if, as we sample more planetary, asteroid, and interstellar matter, that we simply find RNA everywhere?
that RNA simply permeates the entire universe: in the oort cloud, on europa, on ceres, in interstellar dust, in the data sent back to from probes to other stars/ exoplanets, etc
that life is not unique to earth, and that life is pretty much inevitable wherever the conditions are right. we got used to the fact that earth is not the center of the universe, and then that our star isn't even that notable. as we discover more exoplanets, we'e beginning to come to grips with the ho hum mundane facts of the existence of millions of planets. yet right now we operate on the assumption life on earth is this rare unique thing native to here. really?
and then the question would be: why RNA everywhere? how long has this been going on? where did it start? or for all practical purposes has it always been so and the ubiquity of panspermic RNA makes it pretty much a pat cosmological fact without discoverable cause or reason?
it would be a pretty awesome intersection of; astronomy, cosmology, theology, biology, and even mathematics/ physics/ information technologythat complexity is simply inevitable, and that information storage and retrieval is an emergent phenomenon intrinsic to the way physical laws inexorably play out... and that this is "God". deus ex machina
and it's entirely possible, as we keep looking
ok, sorry, i'll put down the marijuana. dude: have you ever looked at your hand? l mean REALLY look at your HAND
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
A giant rock has been on Earth for forty years, and just now they're discovering that it's contains organic compounds? Um...did it fall directly into a controlled vacuum?
If you find organic molecules which do not exist on Earth OTHER than on this meteorite, the likely conclusion is that the meteorite is the source, not the recipient.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
From TFA: ...according to the study published in the U.S. Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
I'm going on the assumption that "published" implies past tense. As in, done. Yet, a search of PNAS finds no connection between the quoted author Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin and the word "Murchison" appearing ANYWHERE in the text of an article. And since no title is mentioned and no other authors are mentioned, I'm not really sure what to say.
I mean, I suppose it's possible PNAS completely screwed up somehow. I tried matching just the guy's first name, just his last name. He has written for PNAS in the past. He's written three articles on wine. That's quite a jump, from wine to meteorites.
I'm not saying it's not there. I just can't find it among the 81 PNAS articles on the Murchison meteorite.
"Well the thought of the building blocks for life to have just "formed" on earth is too far fetched."
Why is it far fetched? We've generated nearly every one of the bases of RNA and DNA in conditions that mimic the early Earth - Some from experiments like the Miller-Urey Experiment created a whole slew of different organic compounds, and more recent studies have shown the synthesis of an amino acid resulting from exposure to ultra-violet light (I believe it was uracil?) - showing that there are many many different ways to create complex organic compounds.
-Bill
Boy, if the creationists were upset at the idea of being related to Chimps, imagine how they'll go ape over being the spawn of alien space dung!
Well the thought of the building blocks for life to have just "formed" on earth is too far fetched.
Basically you're promoting "vitalism"
Organic chemistry dropped vitalism around 1828 more or less due to Wohler synthesis.
Looks like biology still hasn't made that advance yet, OR your belief is a bit out of date, out of step with modern bio beliefs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wohler_synthesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
You mean they'll go ape-shit?
There's no way to prove with absolutely certainty that there aren't still velociraptors out there hiding somewhere....biding their time.
To build on your point, I read the same story yesterday (could be the same source, I don't recall) and their work is based on mass spectrometry only (from the vague, unscientific, dumbed down crap that finally makes it to the popular press so I could be wrong). Essentially, they would crush a small sample of the meteorite, analyze it for known compounds/elements (dunno what instruments they use) and infer the composition. Their spokesperson also mentioned that their instruments aren't sensitive to every single ion species so they might even be missing things. Also, since their selection is just that - a selection - the actual number of different compounds may be much higher!
At this point, people that are really interested in understanding the science should look up the working of a mass spectrometer. The toy model is that you volatilize ("gassify [sic] by heating") your sample and electrically tear apart the molecules using a high voltage between (canonically) a pair of electrodes. Guide the ions electromagnetically into a chamber with a magnetic field perpendicular to the ions' motion. This bends the ions in different circular paths (the radii are different because of the ions' charge/mass ratio). Now, here is where the sophistication (read: cost) of the instrument comes into play - the detectors that measure the incidence of these separated ions. For organic chemistry, your instrument would have C, H, O, N and other common elements calibrated. Of course, this is all just a toy model of how things work - the specific instrument you use would of course have its own pros/cons. Cheaper ones might have more assumptions built into them (where you know what you're trying to measure and just wanna know relative element ratios - clearly this is not what you would want to use for exobiology where assumptions can be fatal).
Here's the abstract of the actual paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/107/7/2763
Full text requires a subscription, alas.
From a quick perusal of the text (University library FTW), this paper is a breakthrough for precisely the reason I alluded to above, i.e. for exobiology, you want to have little to no assumptions built into your investigation - a so-called 'non-targeted investigation' as the authors say. The newer analytical methods they used include (for keyword searches by interested readers): Electrospray ionization (ESI) Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance/mass spectrometry (FTICR/MS), Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) and ultraperformance liquid chromatography coupled to quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UPLC-QTOF/MS). This was from the actual paper.
Intuitively, you can sort of see what all that jargon means (thank science for meaningful terminology). FTICR/MS sounds like making the ions go in a circle using a magnetic field (the rotation frequency for a given charge/mass and mag field is the cyclotron resonant frequency - can be found via Fourier transform methods I presume - this sounds quite interesting and I believe I'll look this up to see exactly how they do it). NMR is simply MRI (the latter is a term used because neobarbs get their panties in a bunch when they hear "nuclear"). Vaguely speaking: you flip nuclear spins using an oscillatory mag field and measure the response - tells you what stuff is made of. Time-of-flight spectrometry is exactly what it sounds like. Recall my toy model of spectrometry. Well, instead of a mag field, you use an electric field to accelerate the ions and figure out how long it takes to make a given trip. Simple high school kinematics tells you the rest. Dunno offhand what the chromatography or ESI are but I'm sure you can google them if you're interested.
By the way, I see that there are many here who bring up the question of whether this is just terrestrial contamination. While the question is legit, the idea that scientists routinely ignore such obvious questions is a symptom of the irresponsible and incomplete nature of sc