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When Carl Sagan said, "The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself" he was poetically accurate. The comets are seeded with the remains of untold countless exploded stars.

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malfist

1 hour ago

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The big bang did. And following it, supernovae. But there's a lot we don't know and science is always advancing!

For example, JWST observed early galaxies are both larger and more diverse materials than we expected. Means there's something new to learn!

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socketcluster

28 minutes ago

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So they found some sticky unidentified alien slime on an asteroid... This sounds like something straight out of an alien movie.

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stronglikedan

22 minutes ago

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Who doesn't like sugars and gum? It's the perfect alien incubation delivery mechanism! I wonder which will be the first scientist to get their chest popped...

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airstrike

33 minutes ago

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Bennu is just the perfect brand name for space gummy bears

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cnnlives86

3 hours ago

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As I’ve been reading findings of extraterrestrial organic molecules recently, I wonder: do we know there was no contamination?

I’m going to be sad if it turns out someone sneezed into it and was afraid to tell their manager.

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Normal_gaussian

1 hour ago

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There are papers covering contamination prevention and detection for every stage of the mission. There are papers with the designs and intentions before launch and papers with how well it went and their specific findings after return.

Here is one sick paper covering some of the clean rooms https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20230005897

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reactordev

3 hours ago

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>”Once soft and flexible, but since hardened, this ancient “space gum” consists of polymer-like materials extremely rich in nitrogen and oxygen. Such complex molecules could have provided some of the chemical precursors that helped trigger life on Earth”

That would be some stale big league chew if that were the case. By orders of billions of years. Making it the oldest wad of big league chew we know of in existence. ;)

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IAmBroom

2 hours ago

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"I will assume that the experts involved have not taken any reasonable precautions, and learned nothing from the past 60 years of acquired experience in space exploration. I will then ask other non-experts in the field if the experts are minimally competent or not."

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gblargg

2 hours ago

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I was thinking the same as parent while reading this. Mentally this activates the same thinking as on those medical tests with a high false positive rate and low incidence, so that most positives are false. I'd like to see in the article how they rule this out. Ideally I'd like to hear that they have measures in place that would allow accidental lapses in isolation to fail and they'd still be able to tell that it was Earth contamination. It's a reasonable concern and having it addressed (with something more satisfying than "they're experts, duh!") makes this kind of finding all the more interesting.

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pixl97

8 minutes ago

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I mean, it's a concern, but there are numerous other odd things in the findings that would not be caused by ground contamination such as the amount of stardust contained in these samples versus other asteroid samples, or the huge amounts of clay/water created minerals found so far.

There are plenty of other articles on the isolation procedures they've taken so far to this point including putting off opening the container for months because of a stripped screw.

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sriram_malhar

1 hour ago

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Spot on.

"I'm just asking questions".

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soco

3 hours ago

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I think the article does a good job clarifying in simple words those questions risen by the slightly click-baity title.

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