The Murchison Meteorite
16th February 2010.
Take a look at this lump of apparantly ordinary looking rock, it doesn’t seem anything spectacular. But this thing has been floating around our solar system for a hell of a long time, 4.65 billion years in fact. This is the length of time that the Murchison Meteorite could have been in existance, even older than the Sun. A time span that you could not even begin to imagine, over a third the age of the Universe itself. This peice of rock is left over “building rubble” from before the formation of Earth, the Sun, and all the other planets.
It came out of the sky in a bright fireball, hitting Australia in 1969 near the town of Murchison, Victoria. Scientists now say that this ancient rocky chunk contains millions of different carbon containing molcules, and organic molecules. These are the actual building blocks of life, and show us a snap shot of the conditions that were present in the very early solar system, like a kind of space fossil. Scientists think the organic molecules could have been picked up by the meteorite as it passed through primordial clouds in the infant solar system.
This is yet more evidence of our (and others?) origins in space, a Universe laced with interstellar clouds carrying all the neccessary building blocks of life. Comets and meteorites delivering their cargo of life ingredients to young planets. Did this happen on Mars, Europa, Titan? Where do we originate from? Is this a common process all over the cosmos?
