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Building blocks of life discovered in Bennu asteroid rewrite origin story: According to the researchers some amino acids, the building blocks for life, in the asteroid Bennu samples likely formed in a different way than was previously thought, in the harsh conditions of the early solar system.

Amino acids, the building blocks necessary for life, were previously found in samples of 4.6-billion-year-old rocks from an asteroid called Bennu, delivered to Earth in 2023 by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. How those amino acids — the molecules that create proteins and peptides in DNA — formed in space was a mystery, but new research led by Penn State scientists shows they could have originated in an icy-cold, radioactive environment at the dawn of Earth’s solar system.

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