Did we find microbial LIFE on an ASTEROID?

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AD | Huge thanks to KiwiCo for sponsoring today’s video! Go to https://kiwico.com/astrodrbecky and use code ASTRODRBECKY for 50% off your first monthly club crate! Finding alien life is the dream for so many astrobiologists. And there have been times over the years where people have thought they might have discovered life beyond Earth. Specifically in the study of meteorites - chunks of space rock that fall to Earth. The problem there though is that in the time between them crash landing and scientists recovering them they can get contaminated with bacteria from Earth. So, there’s been two missions in the past few years that have sent probes to asteroids themselves to collect some pristine, uncontaminated asteroid material and bring it back to Earth for testing: NASA’s OSIRIS-REX mission, and the Japanese space agency, JAXA’s, Hyabusa-2 mission. And it’s in material returned from the Ryugu asteroid by Hyabusa-2 mission that Genge and collaborators found something on the surface that looked like bacteria: microbial life! Now of course this result was literally crawling all over the internet, but let’s just make it clear now that that Genge and collaborators concluded that this was Earth-based bacteria that sadly contaminated the sample. So in this video we’re going to dive into this study and how they concluded that this was sadly just Earth-life they found on the asteroid. Genge et al. (2024) - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/maps.14288 Kawaguchi (2019; panspe

Published 2024-12-12 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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