Dust from asteroid Bennu is revealing a surprising origin story for life’s building blocks. New research suggests some amino acids formed in frozen ice exposed to radiation, not warm liquid water as ...

Amino acids, the building blocks necessary for life, were previously found in samples of 4.6-billion-year-old rocks from an ...

Penn State researchers think a key ingredient for life may have formed in deep freeze, not in a warm asteroid puddle. A space ...

The universe might have far more amino acids lying around than we realized, which gives life itself far more chances to begin.

The discovery is just the latest to come from the asteroid sample, which dates back to the dawn of the solar system.

Tiny grains of dust from asteroid Bennu are reshaping how scientists think life’s ingredients formed in space.

Did the ingredients for life as we know it exist in the early solar system? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academ | Space ...

A new study analyzes three asteroid and two meteorite samples to see if space rocks smacking into Earth could’ve helped ...

With the return of an Asteroid Bennu sample in 2023 as part of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, researchers from the University of Arizona have made significant discoveries toward understanding the origins ...

Samples from the asteroid Bennu hint that some of life’s ingredients were forming long before Earth existed. NASA’s ...

A small saucer-shape capsule carrying a half-pound of rocks and dust collected from an asteroid called Bennu — leftovers from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago — is expected to ...