Decryption – A French-Japanese team has found interesting minerals in samples from the asteroid Ryugu, returned to Earth at the end of 2020. It is a discovery that could be important for explaining how life appeared on our planet.
the Phosphorus It is an element long known for its amazing property: it begins to glow when exposed to air (hence its name, which literally means “light-bearer” in Greek). However, for entirely different reasons, they are of interest to astrobiologists. It is actually a chemical species crucial to the evolution of life on Earth, but we never really knew how it got introduced to our planet in a “usable” form. The discovery of the soluble mineral phosphorus in samples brought back from the asteroid Ryugu in December 2020 has the community excited.
Phosphorus is very important in biology because it forms the backbone of the DNA molecule. “ The phosphodiester bond (carbon-oxygen-phosphorus-oxygen-carbon) that holds together the sugars in DNA is one of the most stable bonds found in organic chemistry.
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