I'm speaking of Bennu.

The asteroid, which we intercepted, is believed to be fragments of a celestial body more than 4 billion years old that originated within our solar system in the area beyond Saturn; that body was destroyed in a collision and one of the pieces remaining is Bennu.  There are quite a large number of asteroids that are on orbits of various periods around the sun which were birthed this way during the earlier years of our solar system.

In 2023 NASA recovered a spacecraft it had sent to deliberately collide with (and was designed to survive that) and thus obtain samples from the asteroid.

What was found in said samples is astounding.

The majority of amino acids that form the basis of all life on Earth were found -- 14 of the 20.  Further, all five of the nucleobases used to craft DNA and RNA into those amino acids were also found, as well as ammonia and formaldehyde, which between the two are the precursors for those.

In addition salts -- including sodium chloride, or common salt, was also found.  That finding is equally significant as it is essential for the formation and maintenance of all life and for all of this to be found in one place is akin to the 2010 (movie) segment when they find chlorophyll where it has no reason to be.

One caution: As I've repeatedly observed over this column's lifetime, and long before it as well in other context, science is not simply the process of discovery; science is, in every case, about replication and conclusions cannot be drawn without replication.

Not in this case and not in any other case.

But -- assuming the findings are true and were not the result of contamination (pre or post), malfeasance or other-than-straightforward presence and recovery the findings are profound.

They provide presumptive evidence that four billion years ago most of the elemental components necessary for life on this planet, including most of the amino acids in completed form, were presumably present in a celestial body beyond the orbit of Saturn.

This in turn strongly implies it didn't start here and further it is extremely unlikely it is unique to this solar system either, simply on the mathematics of how many galaxies, stars and solar systems exist in the known universe.

Incidentally this also throws a huge wrench into a bunch of claims that we're going to be able to do certain things -- some of which I'll talk about on my podcast this weekend, because it is those very same mechanisms that are destructive most of the time on very long odds are almost-certainly what led to this formation in the first place and it continuation here on Earth ultimately leading to the world we live in today -- including us.