Ancient Comet Fragments Found In Antarctic Snow

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Cosmos Magazine: "Two tiny meteorites recently recovered from Antarctic snow contain material dating back to the birth of our Solar System, and may provide clues about the delivery of organic matter to Earth. Researchers believe that these micrometeorites likely came from the cold, comet-forming outer regions of the gas and dust cloud that comprised the early Solar System, and sample its composition. Discovered in 2006, the particles measure less than 0.25 mm across and survived their journey through Earth's atmosphere relatively unscathed. More importantly, scientists found that they contain unusually high amounts of organic matter."

Comments

How do you find it

[phantomfive]

When reading the summary, I wondered how they could find such a small thing. Here is what we find in the story:

To find these sub-millimetre-scale particles, Duprat and colleagues melted and sieved untainted snow that fell near the French-Italian CONCORDIA station in central Antarctica between 1955 and 1970.

I suppose since there isn't much dirt in Antarctica, any that you find has as good a chance of being a meteorite as anything else.

It's turtles all the way

[mangu]

Organic matter can mean a lot of different things. Simple organic molecules may form in the gas clouds in space which give origin to planetary systems.

More complex molecules are a different thing, many of those require liquid water to form. The most plausible answer is that compounds such as methane were formed in space and accreted into earth and the other planets.

Then chemistry in the earth atmosphere and oceans built those into more and more complicated structures until life began.