Biological amino acids could have celestial or terrestrial roots. An experiment simulated their formation in deep space—but the mystery isn’t solved yet.
Nearly a hundred different types of amino acids have been observed in meteorites, but only a dozen of the 20 that are essential for life have been found. Biological amino acids also have a peculiarity that gives them away: They all have a “left-handed” structure, whereas abiotic processes create left- and right-handed molecules in equal measure.
The researchers began by creating the most common molecular ices found in interstellar clouds—water, carbon dioxide, methanol, and ammonia—in a vacuum chamber. Then they bombarded the ices with a beam of high energy protons, mimicking collisions with cosmic rays in deep space. The ices broke apart and reassembled into larger molecules, eventually forming a gunky residue visible to the naked eye: chunks of amino acids.
This trend is noteworthy, Qasim says, because it shows that conditions within the interstellar cloud would have had a strong influence on the makeup of amino acids inside the asteroid. But ultimately, their experiment ran into the same problem other lab studies have: The distribution of amino acids still didn’t match that found in real meteorites. The most notable difference was the excess of beta-alanine over alpha-alanine in their lab samples.
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