"Frozen" Recipe for Extraterrestrial Vitamin B3
This is an artist’s concept of a protoplanetry disk surrounding a forming star that is ejecting jets of material (yellow beams). Such disks contain countless tiny dust grains, many of which become incorporated into asteroids, comets, and planets.
Credits: NASA Goddard
The new work builds on earlier research by the team in which they analyzed carbon-rich meteorites and discovered that vitamin B3 was present at concentrations ranging from about 30 to 600 parts-per-billion. In that work, the team performed preliminary laboratory experiments that showed vitamin B3could be made from a simpler building-block organic molecule called pyridine in carbon dioxide ice under conditions that simulated the environment in space.
The new experiments made the simulation more realistic by adding water ice to the mixture and using amounts closer to what is expected for interstellar ices and comets. The team found that even with the addition of water, the vitamin could be made under a wide variety of scenarios where the water ice abundance varied by up to ten times.
“We found that the types of organic compounds in our laboratory-produced ices match very well to what is found in meteorites,” said Karen Smith of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This result suggests that these important organic compounds in meteorites may have originated from simple molecular ices in space. This type of chemistry may also be relevant for comets, which contain large amounts of water and carbon dioxide ices. These experiments show that vitamin B3 and other complex organic compounds could be made in space and it is plausible that meteorite and comet impacts could have added an extraterrestrial component to the supply of vitamin B3 on ancient Earth.”
Smith, who is lead author of a paper on this research published online June 17, 2015 in Chemical Communications, performed the work with her team at NASA Goddard, including her postdoctoral research advisor, Perry Gerakines of NASA Goddard. “This work is part of a broad research program in the field of Astrobiology at NASA Goddard,” Gerakines said. “We are working to understand the origins of biologically important molecules and how they came to exist throughout the Solar System and on Earth. The experiments performed in our laboratory demonstrate an important possible connection between the complex organic molecules formed in cold interstellar space and those we find in meteorites.”
Exploding stars (supernovae) and the winds from red giant stars near the end of their lives produce vast clouds of gas and dust. Solar systems are born when shock waves from stellar winds and other nearby supernovae compress and concentrate a cloud of ejected stellar material until dense clumps of that cloud begin to collapse under their own gravity, forming a new generation of stars and planets.
Credits: Karen Smith/NASA Goddard
The team performed an initial analysis of the contents of the frozen layer by shining infrared light on it to identify absorption patterns – certain molecules absorb infrared light at specific colors, or frequencies. The plate was then heated to room temperature so the ice residue could be analyzed in greater detail at Goddard’s Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory. The team found that this experiment produced a variety of complex organic molecules, including vitamin B3.
Observations from the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission, now in orbit around Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, might add more support to the theory that comets brought organic matter to Earth. “Rosetta could help validate these experiments if it finds some of the same complex organic molecules in the gases released by the comet or in the comet’s nucleus,” said Smith.
This work was supported by a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellowship administered by Oak Ridge Associated Universities through a contract with NASA, the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) via the Goddard Center for Astrobiology (GCA), and the NASA Cosmochemistry Program. NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, administers the NAI.
Contacts and sources:
Bill Steigerwald
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Source:
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