Identify where life could have originated before Earth?

A complex organic substance may have formed in cold interstellar clouds, clinging to the "Dragon Palace" and the parent body of the Murchison meteorite, long before Earth and even the Solar System were born.

That is the latest discovery of a research team from Curtin University (Australia).

Could cold interstellar clouds be the origin of life and all organic molecules? - (Photo: SPACE.COM).

According to Sci-News , the authors conducted controlled burning experiments on some Australian plants and produced polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and compared them with PAHs inside samples from the Ryugu asteroid and the Murchison meteorite .

Asteroid Ryugu, named after the "Dragon Palace" in Japanese legend, was successfully sampled by Japan's Hayabusa-2 spacecraft and brought back to Earth a few years ago.

Meanwhile, the Murchison meteorite is a billion-year-old meteorite that fell to Australia in the 1970s.

Both Ryugu and Murchison are confirmed to contain "seeds of life" , which are the building blocks of more complex compounds, including proteins in the human body and living organisms, as well as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

In this case, it was the PAHs in these two space rock samples that revealed their origin.

Co-author Professor Kliti Grice from the Western Australian Centre for Organic and Isotope Geochemistry at Curtin University said the bonds between light and heavy carbon isotopes in the PAHs were analysed, revealing the temperature at which they formed.

The PAHs in Ryugu and Murchison include small PAHs that were produced in warmer environments, such as near a star or inside a celestial body.

But more interesting are the large PAHs, which likely formed in cold interstellar clouds, and thus predate the Solar System.

This means that smaller structures — the amino acids that make up PAHs as well as the molecules of early life — were also roaming the interstellar medium long before the solar system and Earth existed.

In other words, our deepest origins, may be from cold interstellar clouds.