The building blocks for organic matter have been discovered on the asteroid Bennu, as deatiled in a new study in the journal Nature Astronomy. The research gives new insight into how life originated on Earth and where we might find it elsewhere in the universe.

They’re the building rocks of life. Analysis of debris from the nearly 5 billion-year-old asteroid Bennu suggests the ingredients to life on Earth were present in the early days of our solar system, as detailed in a series of papers published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Scientists have discovered numerous organic compounds in samples from the asteroid Bennu, including key amino acids and the building blocks of DNA and RNA. This discovery suggests that the components necessary for life may have been commonly present in the early Solar System,