NASA researchers have discovered organic material inside a meteorite that recently fell in Canada’s Tagish Lake. The meteorite is especially valuable because scientists collected it shortly after it crashed in 2000, ensuring it wasn’t contaminated by local bacteria. The meteorite seems to contain many small hollow organic globules, which probably formed in the cold molecular cloud of gas and dust that gave birth to the Solar System. Meteorites like this have been falling to Earth for billions of years, and probably seeded the early planet with organic material.
Carbon globules in meteorite may have seeded Earth life