Asteroid Samples Suggest a Solar System of Ancient, Salty Incubators

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By Molly Herring, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: Researchers have found salts in samples from asteroid Ryugu. Combined with similar salty discoveries from asteroid Bennu, the finding suggests that aqueous incubators of life’s first ingredients may have been relatively common in the early solar system. ...The results from Ryugu were reported in Nature Astronomy in November 2024, and those from Bennu were reported in January 2025. The parallel discoveries paint a compelling picture of the early solar system. ...“We can now say, for the first time, that 4.5 billion years ago—long before most of us thought it could happen—we had both the ingredients and the environment in which the early stages of organic evolution towards life could begin,” said Tim McCoy, a curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History who studied the Bennu samples. Such evolution “didn’t happen on a large, icy moon or a large, warm planet like Earth. It was actually happening in asteroids at the birth of the solar system. From day one of the solar system, we were seeing this organic evolution.”.... 

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