Molecular diversity in the Murchison meteorite

摘要

A reanalysis of the Murchison meteorite using high-resolution structural spectroscopy has revealed that the carbonaceous chondrite meteorite contains more organic compounds than previously thought. The result suggests that the primordial solar system contained a large variety of organic chemicals that likely equaled and possibly surpassed the molecular diversity found on Earth. Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin et al. (pp. 2763-2768) analyzed the carbon-rich meteorite, which fell in Australia in 1969, and they identified more than 150,000 mass signals leading to more than 14,000 different elementary compositions. Previous studies had reveated a complex mixture of large and small organic chemicals, including amino acids. Given the different isomers for organic molecules with the same composition, the authors calculated that the meteorite should contain several million different carbon-, hydrogen-, nitrogen-, oxygen-, and sulfur-based organic chemicals. The meteorite originates from the earliest days of the solar system and likely passed through many primordial clouds in the early solar system, picking up different organic chemicals, according to the authors. From a description of the elemental distributions within the organic compounds, the authors propose a sequence through which the organic chemicals may have formed in space.