#Astrobiology
Life's ingredients in meteorites, water-altered asteroids, and the search for life beyond Earth.
Astrobiology asks how life began and whether it exists anywhere else. Meteorites contribute real evidence: amino acids, sugars and nucleobases made without life, delivered to Earth from space.
Many meteorites also show that their parent asteroids once held liquid water. Clays, carbonates and other minerals formed when warm water flowed through rock inside young asteroids, sometimes for millions of years.
Studying these rocks helps scientists judge which worlds could have been habitable, and how to recognise a genuine sign of life, as the long debate over the Martian meteorite ALH 84001 shows.
Part of Meteorites across the sciences.
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- Chirality and the origin of lifeLife uses left-handed amino acids almost exclusively. Some meteorites contain a small excess of left-handed forms, a clue to how this prefer