n years ago, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe pulled up alongside a dusty,

icy lump the size of a mountain. The probe would follow its quarry, a comet called
67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, for two years as onboard instruments caught and analyzed
the dust and gas streaming away from the comet. Scientists sought hints about how
our solar system came to be — and about the origin of one class of molecules in
particular.

Organic molecules — compounds containing carbon — abound on Earth, especially in

the bodies of living things. They’re often called the building blocks of life, and
for good reason: Carbon atoms can chemically bond to four other atoms and easily
form long, stable chains that serve as “carbon backbones” for complex biological
molecules.

The Rosetta mission and others have shown just how ubiquitous organic molecules are
in space, too.

“Rosetta really changed the view,” said Nora Hänni(opens a new tab), a chemist at
the University of Bern who has been analyzing data from the probe. When Hänni and
her colleagues processed just one day’s worth of the probe’s data in 2022, they
uncovered(opens a new tab) 44 different organic molecules. Some were very complex,
containing 20 atoms or more. Rosetta caught whiffs of glycine(opens a new tab), one
of the amino acid building blocks of proteins. And more recently, Hänni used
Rosetta data to identify dimethyl sulfide(opens a new tab) — a gas that, on Earth,
is only known to be produced by living organisms.

What Rosetta did for comets, Japan’s Hayabusa2 and NASA’s Osiris-Rex are doing for
asteroids. In 2020 and 2023, respectively, the two missions scooped up samples of
the asteroids Bennu and Ryugu and returned the samples to Earth. Scientists have
been sifting through the material ever since, and they find that both asteroids
sport plenty of organic molecules. Ryugu alone contains at least 20,000 kinds(opens
a new tab), including 15 different amino acids.

“It’s just everything possible from which life could emerge,” said Philippe
Schmitt-Kopplin(opens a new tab), an organic geoscientist at the Technical
University of Munich.

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A collage of photos depicting sample return from orbit
After NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft scooped material from the asteroid Bennu, the
capsule containing the sample reentered Earth’s atmosphere and landed in Utah in
September 2023. The sample was then taken to Johnson Space Center in Houston for
analysis.

These and other organic molecules likely formed in the twilight years of the
earliest stars, perhaps as early as a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
Dying stars exhale hot stellar winds; any carbon swept up in these winds
essentially burns up, producing stellar soot. “It’s actually not too different from
combustion as we understand it here on Earth,” Öberg said. In the hot, gas-rich
environments around dying stars, she explained, “it’s quite easy to put carbon ato

NASA
How simple chemistry led to complex living organisms stands among the great
unsolved mysteries of science. The recent studies of asteroid and comet material
add to the evidence that the first steps of the assembly process happen in space —
and happen very readily. Everywhere we look, space seems to teem with biology’s raw
materials. Saturn’s moon Titan has lakes of liquid methane and ethane that are made
of organic molecules, as are its hydrocarbon sand dunes. Organic molecules called
tholins are probably responsible for Pluto’s reddish blush. Veritable zoos of
extraterrestrial organics are found in meteorites. Organic dust drifts between the
stars and rains down on Saturn from its rings.

Scientists have long wondered where these molecules come from. Did the compounds
that slosh about in Titan’s hydrocarbon lakes form there, or were they around long
before the icy moon even existed? How does organic complexity develop without
biological evolution?

Mark Belan/Quanta Magazine

“Those of us interested in searching for life have to understand how planets could
acquire organics in the absence of life,” said Christopher Glein(opens a new tab),
a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. “We spend a lot of time
thinking about this.”

“I would like to know where we come from as a planetary species,” said Karin
Öberg(opens a new tab), an astrochemist at Harvard University. “This is as close as
you get to one of the big origin questions, which is where Earth as a habitable
planet came from. Why is it the way it is?”

By sending probes to sample primordial comets and asteroids, peering into planet-
forming disks with telescopes, and re-creating spacelike conditions in labs and
computer models, scientists are uncovering the origins of complex organic
molecules. Their findings indicate that planets like ours likely inherit much of
their organic material from a time before the sun.

Fire and Ice

Last year, researchers glimpsed the earliest known occurrence of organic chemistry
in the universe. The James Webb Space Telescope observed a young galaxy, seeing it
as it appeared just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, and detected polycyclic
aromatic hydrocarbons(opens a new tab) — hefty molecules that look a bit like
honeycombs. On Earth, they’re found in anything involving tar, from fossil fuels to
wood smoke. In space, they’re components of asteroids — including those that fall
to Earth as meteorites — and of interstellar dust.