PSRD: Organic Globules from the Cold Far Reaches

Keiko Nakamura-Messenger and colleagues at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, studied minute globules of organic material in the Taglish Lake carbonaceous chondrite. This meteorite was collected soon after it fell, so is fresh and likely to be uncontaminated with terrestrial organic compounds. Using microanalytical techniques the NASA team found that the globules had hydrogen and nitrogen isotopic compositions consistent with chemical reactions at strikingly frigid temperatures, only 10 to 20 K (-253 to -263 C). Temperatures that low occur in cold, interstellar molecular clouds like the one that collapsed to form the Solar System or in the outermost part of the disk surrounding the Sun when it was forming. These organic globules might represent the type of prebiotic carbon compounds that were delivered to young Earth.