Space: the very first images of extraterrestrial molecules revealed


A landmark event. The scientific work carried out jointly by French researchers, IBM and NASA, has made it possible, for the very first time, to identify extraterrestrial molecules.

The photos attesting to this feat were published on February 2 in the scientific journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science. A discovery unthinkable several decades ago, and which was made possible thanks to the use of atomic force microscopes to obtain images at the scale of the atom.

The sample in question which allowed this tremendous advance, was extracted from a meteorite of at least 100 kilos which fell in Murchison (Australia), in September 1969. As the Parisian recalls, the famous “pebble” has is the subject of multiple analyses, scientists having even managed in January 2020 to update micrograins dated seven billion years.

“We received a pinhead, it’s big enough to do a manipulation or two,” revealed Carlos Afonso, professor of analytical chemistry at the University of Rouen-Normandy to Parisian. The next step will be to analyze Martian samples within ten years.





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