The Cosmos Teems with Complex Organic Molecules

 Ten years ago, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe pulled up alongside a dusty, icy lump the size of a mountain. The probe would follow its quarry, a comet called 67P/Churyumov- Gerasimenko, for two years as onboard instruments caught and analyzed the dust and gas streaming away from the comet. Scientists sought hints about how our solar system came to be — and about the origin of one class of molecules in particular.

Organic molecules — compounds containing carbon — abound on Earth, especially in the bodies of living things. They’re often called the building blocks of life, and for good reason: Carbon atoms can chemically bond to four other atoms and easily form long, stable chains that serve as “carbon backbones” for complex biological molecules.

The Rosetta mission and others have shown just how ubiquitous organic molecules are in space, too.

“Rosetta really changed the view,” said Nora Hänni(opens a new tab), a chemist at the University of Bern who has been analyzing data from the probe. When Hänni and her colleagues processed just one day’s worth of the probe’s data in 2022, they uncovered(opens a new tab) 44 different organic molecules. Some were very complex, containing 20 atoms or more. Rosetta caught whiffs of glycine(opens a new tab), one of the amino acid building blocks of proteins. And more recently, Hänni used Rosetta data to identify dimethyl sulfide(opens a new tab) — a gas that, on Earth, is only known to be produced by living organisms.

What Rosetta did for comets, Japan’s Hayabusa2 and NASA’s Osiris-Rex are doing for asteroids. In 2020 and 2023, respectively, the two missions scooped up samples of the asteroids Bennu and Ryugu and returned the samples to Earth. Scientists have been sifting through the material ever since, and they find that both asteroids sport plenty of organic molecules. Ryugu alone contains at least 20,000 kinds(opens a new tab), including 15 different amino acids.

“It’s just everything possible from which life could emerge,” said Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin(opens a new tab), an organic geoscientist at the Technical University of Munich.

The recent studies of asteroid and comet material add to the evidence that the first steps of the assembly process happen in space — and happen very readily. Everywhere we look, space seems to teem with biology’s raw materials. Saturn’s moon Titan has lakes of liquid methane and ethane that are made of organic molecules, as are its hydrocarbon sand dunes. Organic molecules called tholins are probably responsible for Pluto’s reddish blush. Veritable zoos of extraterrestrial organics are found in meteorites. Organic dust drifts between the stars and rains down on Saturn from its rings.

Scientists have long wondered where these molecules come from. Did the compounds that slosh about in Titan’s hydrocarbon lakes form there, or were they around long before the icy moon even existed? How does organic complexity develop without biological evolution

“Those of us interested in searching for life have to understand how planets could acquire organics in the absence of life,” said Christopher Glein(opens a new tab), a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. “We spend a lot of time thinking about this.”

“I would like to know where we come from as a planetary species,” said Karin Öberg(opens a new tab), an astrochemist at Harvard University. “This is as close as you get to one of the big origin questions, which is where Earth as a habitable planet came from. Why is it the way it is?”

By sending probes to sample primordial comets and asteroids, peering into planet-forming disks with telescopes, and re-creating spacelike conditions in labs and computer models, scientists are uncovering the origins of complex organic molecules. Their findings indicate that planets like ours likely inherit much of their organic material from a time before the sun.

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