Turns out asteroids are far weirder than we ever suspected.
As the paper notes, the compounds found in the Ryugu samples may well be as old as our Solar System — or even older.
"The organic matter in Ryugu probably consists of primordial materials that formed during the early stages of the Solar System’s formation," reads the paper. In the release, paper co-author Daniel Glavin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center noted that while these potentially life-giving compounds were present in the Ryugu samples, actual signs of life were not.
"Sugars and nucleobases which have been discovered in some carbon-rich meteorites, have not yet been identified in samples returned from Ryugu," Glavin said in the NASA press release. "It is possible these compounds are present in asteroid Ryugu but are below our analytical detection limits given the relatively small sample mass available for study."
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