astrochemist

"A comet traveling through the interstellar medium basically is getting cooked by cosmic radiation, forming hydrogen as a result. Our thought was: If this was happening, could you actually trap it in the body, so that when it entered the solar system and it was warmed up, it would outgas that hydrogen?" said co-author of the paper Jennifer Bergner, an astrochemist with the University of California, Berkeley, in a media statement.

“We show that this mechanism can explain many of Oumuamua’s peculiar properties without fine-tuning,” write Jennifer Bergner, an astrochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, and Darryl Z. Seligman, of Cornell University, in a paper published on Wednesday in Nature.

"Our key finding is that uracil and niacin, both of which are of biological significance, are indeed present in extraterrestrial environments and they may have been provided to the early Earth as a component of asteroids and meteorites. We suspect they had a role in prebiotic evolution on Earth and possibly for the emergence of first life," said astrochemist Yasuhiro Oba of Hokkaido University in Japan, lead author of the research published in the journal Nature Communications.

Unlike in previous work, the methods used this time were more sensitive and did not use strong acids or hot liquid to extract the five components, known as nucleobases, according to astrochemist Yasuhiro Oba of Hokkaido University’s Institute of Low Temperature Science in Japan, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Communications.

“Overall, it's just a really cool result,” says Massachusetts Institute of Technology astrochemist Brett McGuire, who was not involved in the study.