Biomolecules on icy worlds

Featuring image: Artists impression of Hayabusa2 approaching Ryugu. Image credit: NASA/JPL, Public Domain (CC0)

Paper: Uracil in the carbonaceous asteroid (162173) Ryugu

Authors: Y. Oba, T. Koga, Y. Takano, N. O. Ogawa, N. Ohkouchi, K. Sasaki, H. Sato, D. P. Glavin, J. P. Dworkin, H. Naraoka, S. Tachibana, H. Yurimoto, T. Nakamura, T. Noguchi, R. Okazaki, H. Yabuta, K. Sakamoto, T. Yada, M. Nishimura, A. Nakato, A. Miyazaki, K. Yogata, M. Abe, T. Okada, T. Usui, M. Yoshikawa, T. Saiki, S. Tanaka, F. Terui, S. Nakazawa, S. Watanabe, Y. Tsuda and Hayabusa2-initial-analysis SOM team

Bringing a space probe to an asteroid is hard. Bringing back a piece of that asteroid to Earth is even harder. Nevertheless, Hayabusa2 successfully brought back samples from the asteroid Ryugu and gives us valuable insight on the abundance of biomolecules in our solar system.

What the Japanese space agency JAXA accomplished is extraordinary. After the successful sample return mission of Hayabusa from asteroid 25143 Itokawa in 2010, the successor mission again was able to bring us back precious, pristine asteroid material, including gas samples. In contrast to Itokawa, the new target Ryugu represents a much more pristine asteroid, chemically connected to a class of meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites. Researchers already detected the very building blocks of life, like amino acids and nucleobases, in these meteorites. The careful analysis of the Hayabusa2 samples revealed that one of the nucleobases, uracil, is also present in Ryugu.

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Humpback Whale Singing at a Norwegian Feeding Ground

Humpback Whales Underwater

Papers: Changes in humpback whale song structure and complexity reveal a rapid evolution on a feeding ground in Northern Norway; Humpback Whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) Song on a Subarctic Feeding Ground

Authors: Saskia C. Tyarks, Ana S. Aniceto, Heidi Ahonen, Geir Pedersen and Ulf Lindstrøm

Featured Image: Humpback whales swimming near Tonga. Photo by Elianne Dipp.

US Navy engineer Frank Watlington was searching for Russian submarines in the 1950s when his underwater microphone picked up some otherworldly noises: humpback whale singing. He was amazed to realize that the whale vocalizations were arranged in an intricate pattern that repeated itself in a song-like manner, with a similar structure to music composed by humans. 

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