http://dsc.discovery.com/news/afp/20030623/meteorite.html
Meteorite Reveals Signs of Life from Space By Danny Kingsley Discovery Channel News June 26, 2003 Unique carbon building blocks of life called fullerenes did indeed crash to Earth in meteorites, new British research has found. The work by Peter Harris from Reading University has provided the first direct evidence of fullerenes - a special type of carbon molecule associated with the origins of life - in meteorite samples. The analysis of samples from the Allende meteorite which fell on Mexico in 1969 is published this week online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Fullerenes are a type of carbon molecule first discovered in the mid-1980s, the most famous of which is the buckyball, which is a closed spherical molecule the shape of a soccer ball. The fullerenes discovered by Harris and colleagues were completely closed and relatively large, containing around 6,000 to 10,000 carbon atoms each, and with a generally disordered structure. Since the Allende meteorite has been shown to have formed at the same time as our solar system's planets, the findings, which show fullerenes are capable of surviving for billions of years in space, provide a further step towards understanding where life came from. "One possibility for where the organic building blocks for life came from is that they came from space," said Dr Jeremy Bailey from the Anglo Australian Observatory in Sydney. "Not so much that life itself came from space, but the organic molecules that you need to make the primordial soup could have come from space." "It's certainly an interesting result, but not a surprising one," Bailey told ABC Science Online. "People have generally believed there are fullerenes in space and it's not surprising that you find them in these meteorites because there are plenty of other organic molecules in the meteorites." The findings also support previous claims by astrobiologist Luann Becker at the University of Washington in Seattle, that fullerenes were present in carbonaceous material from meteorites. Her work was considered controversial because of methods she used to identify the fullerenes - laser desorption mass spectroscopy - could have modified the carbon samples, creating the fullerene compounds it was supposed to be finding. ______________________________________________ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
