Space communications expert, Alexandra Doten, has explained what the discovery of a gum-like substance on an asteroid 63 million kilometres from Earth could change what we think about the origins of life
Alan Johnson Social News Reporter
11:28, 05 Dec 2025
An astronomer has explained what the discovery of asteroid, Bennu, means for how we view life (stock)(Image: dzika_mrowka/iStock via Getty Images)
An astronomer has said scientific discoveries on asteroid could change what we believe about ‘life as we know it’. Space communications expert, Alexandra Doten took to TikTok to detail the “huge news” after a spacecraft “grabbed a chunk” from asteroid, Bennu – some 63 million kilometres away – and safely returned it to our planet for analysis.
According to NASA, Bennu “continues to provide new clues to scientists’ biggest questions about the formation of the early solar system and the origins of life”. Indeed, scientists at Tohoku University in Japan found Bennu contains sugars essential for life on Earth – the first such discovery in history in an extraterrestrial sample.
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“They found some truly insane things,” Alexandra said of the team, led by Yoshihiro Furukawa. “We already knew from this sample that the asteroid has high carbon content and water together – and together those indicate the building blocks for life as we know it.”
Alexandra explained that Bennu is also rich in nitrogen and organic compounds, as well as being “covered” in the mineral, serpentine, which “looks a lot like a rock we find in mid-ocean ridges [on Earth] under water”.
She continued: “Scientists think this asteroid is a chunk of an ancient water world that has been travelling through space for billions of years.”
Alexandra then broke down the science behind Bennu’s structure and how it compares to our planet. “On Earth, life uses 20 amino acids to create proteins – and they found 14 of them on this asteroid,” she said.
On top of that, the five nucleotide bases used to create DNA and RNA were all found on Bennu. Alexandra continued: “This week, scientists announced that on the asteroid, they found sugars essential for biology – specifically ribose and glucose.”
Ribose forms part of RNA’s name – Ribonucleic acid – which according to Alexandra, means that all of the components required to create RNA are present in Bennu. “This has huge implications – it could imply that RNA is more prevalent in the universe and could be the dominant form of early life,” she enthused.
Meanwhile in a second paper published in the journal Natural Astronomy and led by Scott Sandford at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley and Zack Gainsforth of the University of California detailed a gum-like substance found on the asteroid, which Alexandra says has never been seen before on a space rock.
NASA said of the substance: “It was also flexible – a pliable material, similar to used gum or even a soft plastic. Indeed, during their work with the samples, researchers noticed the strange material was bendy and dimpled when pressure was applied. The stuff was translucent, and exposure to radiation made it brittle, like a lawn chair left too many seasons in the sun.”
Alexandra closed, meanwhile, noting a third paper in the same journal and led by Ann Nguyen of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston: “Finally, the scientists found an unexpectedly high amount of dust, produced by supernova explosions that predate our solar system.”
Writing in response to the findings, one scientist penned: “As a biologist, this is actually INSANE because the implication is crazy. If we found amino acids and ribose sugar on an asteroids from a foreign planet, it can imply the following things: life is prevalent in the universe, life on earth could be brought down from an asteroid from a foreign planet and didn’t need to evolve completely on earth, life evolve in similar ways on different planets and that the recipe for life is the same!
“The last one is insane because that means the chemistry that is possible for life is narrow, and that if aliens exist, they would have similar biology at the molecular level as us. There are too many things to unpack here but this is insanely fascinating and scary at the time.”
A second person pondered: “There’s got to be a gigantic patch of life sustaining planets or even galaxies interacting with each other somewhere and we are the result of a little piece that drifted far away and landed in just the right spot.”
Whilst a third TikTok user theorised: “I strongly feel like that’s how life/nature came to be on Earth. Like what if the asteroid that separated the earth before earth and created the moon had half of the components earth before earth already contained and then they came together and then boom life/nature came to be?
“If this could be true it would also explain if we really are alone in this universe, what if another asteroid had half of the elements another planet needed to create life and then that’s how they would have come to be too.”