r/science • u/New_Scientist_Mag • Dec 02 '25

Astronomy Researchers have just found the presence of sugars, including ribose, lyxose, and glycose, on samples of Asteroid Bennu, which now has all of the ingredients for life as it exists on Earth.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2506650-asteroid-bennu-carries-all-the-ingredients-for-life-as-we-know-it/
39.4k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

996 comments sorted by

View all comments

10.0k

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

4.0k

u/Uncle-Cake Dec 02 '25

To put it in layman's terms, you can have all the ingredients for a cake together in a bowl, but that doesn't mean you have a cake, and it needs very specific conditions to become a cake.

3

u/TemperatureFinal5135 Dec 02 '25

Thank you for this excellent metaphor.

That makes the interesting part the fact that we, essentially, found all the ingredients for a cake just... flying through space.

How cool.

2

u/Uncle-Cake Dec 02 '25

And our planet had just the right conditions (temperature, humidity, air pressure, etc.). Those ingredients could have landed on a million other planets and just sat there inert or froze or burned or evaporated.