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NNadir

(38,628 posts)
4. The list of compounds definitively identified as well as NIST matches without retention time matches, reported in S1...
Thu May 28, 2026, 05:58 PM
20 hrs ago

...don't strike me as biogenic; they're mostly aromatics hardly functionalized other than with alkyl groups.

This is not quite as dramatic as say the Murchison meteorite to which they refer repeatedly.

It's an interesting finding, in a geochemical sense, but not all that surprising.

Naphthalene is often identified in interstellar space, for example.

I hold in a wholly speculative way based only on a very superficial reading, that molecular biology originated in space where it strikes me chirality might arise because of asymmetric radiation fields. From what I can recall from my readings on the Murchison meteorite, which probably goes back more than a decade, it did exhibit some asymmetric amino acids, a remarkable finding.

This is cool, but won't keep me up at night.

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