From Dr. Becky.
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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; panspermia review, Chapter 27 of astrobiology textbook) – https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-13-3639-3_27
Burckle & Delaney (1999; terrestrial microfossils in meteorites) – https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1999M%26PS…34..475B
Oro & Tornabene (1965; bacteria contamination of meteorites) – https://www.jstor.org/stable/1717928?origin=ads
Hoover et al. (1998; indigenous microfossils in meteorites) – https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie/3441/1/Further-evidence-of-microfossils-in-carbonaceous-meteorites/10.1117/12.319839.short
Hoover et al. (2018; indigenous microfossils in meteorites) – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S0031030118130051
Rozanov et al. (2021; indigenous microfossils in meteorites) – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S0031030121010111
00:00 Introduction
01:50 – AD | Kiwi Co
03:18 – Why we even care about finding life on asteroids (i.e. panspermia)
07:55 – What Genge and collaborators found
10:10 – Why they think this was contamination from Earth bacteria
12:58 – What implications this result has
15:17 – Bloopers
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: https://www.fiverr.com/mgs_editing
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👩🏽💻 I’m Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don’t know. If you’ve ever wondered about something in space and couldn’t find an answer online – you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
