Life's building blocks found on asteroid Ryugu, hinting at extraterrestrial origins.
Samples from the asteroid Ryugu have provided evidence that the organic building blocks for life on Earth came from space. Researchers have discovered concentrations of uracil, one of the four nucleobases of RNA, in the samples, confirming that nucleobases are present in pristine asteroidal material dating back to the earliest days of the solar system. The discovery is a step towards understanding the origin of life and whether the processes that led to the appearance of life on Earth can be repeated elsewhere in the universe.