Space Rocks Carry Hundreds of Thousands of Complex Organic Molecules-and We Just Photographed Them

Scientists have known for a while that meteorites contain the “building blocks” of life - complex organic molecules such as amino acids, simple sugars, or even the chemical rungs of DNA. But anyone who has taken an organic chemistry class knows there are plenty of other carbon-based molecules out there, and a new study from Joseph W. Frye-Jones of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and Florida State, which was published in The Planetary Science Journal, found tens of thousands of types of previously unseen organic compounds in two of the world’s most famous meteorites.

Many meteorites formed even before the planets of the solar system, in a cauldron of gas and dust that circled the Sun. Some of them, known as carbonaceous chondrites, managed to avoid the planetary formation process and preserved their chemistry, which in some cases dates back to even before the Sun was born.