Related papers: The prebiotic pathway from P-bearing iron meteorit…
The prebiotic history of phosphorus is a matter of debate in the scientific community: its origin, how it landed on Earth, the selective speciation of the phosphate, and its inclusion into the organic matrix are the main unsolved issues. In…
The mineral schreibersite, e.g., Fe$_3$P, is commonly found in iron-rich meteorites and could have served as an abiotic phosphorus source for prebiotic chemistry. However, atomistic calculations of its degradation chemistry generally…
Research over the past four decades has shown a rich variety of complex organic molecular content in some meteorites. This current study is an attempt to gain a better insight into the thermal conditions experienced by these molecules…
Aqueous chemistry within carbonaceous planetesimals is promising for synthesizing prebiotic organic matter essential to all life. Meteorites derived from these planetesimals delivered these life building blocks to the early Earth,…
The origin of life is yet a compelling scientific mystery that has sometimes been attributed to high-pressure impacts by small solar system bodies such as comets, meteoroids, asteroids, and transitional objects. High-pressure torsion (HPT)…
The collision history of asteroids is an important archive of inner Solar System evolution. Evidence for these collisions is brought to Earth by meteorites, which can preserve impact-reset radioisotope mineral ages. However, as meteorites…
The origin of life required the emergence of metabolism, an autocatalytic network of enzymatic reactions that synthesize amino acids, nucleotides and cofactors. At the origin of metabolism there were no enzymes--how did it start? Empirical…
The chemistry of phosphorus (31P) in space is particularly significant due to the key role it plays in biochemistry on Earth. Utilising radio and infrared spectroscopic observations, several key phosphorus-containing molecules have been…
A key challenge in origin-of-life studies is understanding the environmental conditions on early Earth under which abiogenesis occurred. While some constraints do exist (e.g., zircon evidence for surface liquid water), relatively few…
The study of phosphorus chemistry in the interstellar medium has become a topic of growing interest in astrobiology, because it is plausible that a wide range of P-bearing molecules were introduced in the early Earth by the impact of…
How simple organic matter appeared on Earth and the processes by which it transformed into more evolved organic compounds, which ultimately led to the emergence of life, is still an open topic. Different scenarios have been proposed, the…
Understanding what environmental conditions prevailed on early Earth during the Hadean eon, and how this set the stage for the origins of life, remains a challenge. Geologic processes such as serpentinization and bombardment by chondritic…
Models predict that more than half of all impacting meteoroids should be carbonaceous, reflecting the abundance of carbon-rich asteroids in the main belt and near-Earth space. Yet carbonaceous chondrites represent only about 4% of…
The origin of phosphorus, one of the essential elements for life on Earth, is currently unknown. Prevalent models of Galactic chemical evolution (GCE) underestimate the amount of P compared to observations. The recently discovered P-rich…
Prebiotic molecules, fundamental building blocks for the origin of life, have been found in carbonaceous chondrites. The exogenous delivery of these organic molecules onto the Hadean Earth could have sparked the polymerization of the first…
Carbonaceous chondrites are a class of meteorite known for having a high content of water and organics. In this study, abundances of the nucleobases, i.e., the building blocks of RNA and DNA, found in carbonaceous chondrites are collated…
The possible meteorite parent body origin of Earth's pregenetic nucleobases is substantiated by the guanine (G), adenine (A) and uracil (U) measured in various meteorites. Cytosine (C) and thymine (T) however are absent in meteorites,…
The study shows that the air-derived metal enrichment (up to 2.3 g Zn kg-1, 1.1 g Pb kg-1, and 62 mg Cd kg-1) is retained in a thin layer (~30 cm) around 10-15 cm below the peat surface. A combination of focused ion beam (FIB) technology…
As differentiated planetesimals cool, their cores can solidify from the outside-in, as evidenced by paleomagnetic measurements and cooling rate estimates of iron meteorites. The details of outside-in solidification and fate of residual core…
Nanophase metallic iron ( $\mathrm{npFe}^0$ ) is a key indicator of space weathering on the lunar surface, primarily attributed to solar wind irradiation and micrometeoroid impacts. Recent discoveries of hematite ( $\mathrm{Fe}_2…