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Molecules in space may show how life formed on Earth
Scientists have known for a while that the molecular ingredients of life can be found in nearby comets and meteorites, but it's now clear that those building blocks exist much, much further away from home. A research team has used spectral analysis to discover evidence of organic chiral molecules, the "mirror-image" molecules that are key to biology as we know it, in the Sagittarius B2 cloud near the heart of the Milky Way. This doesn't meant that life is forming in space, but it does suggest that the necessary molecular properties can appear in space first and transfer to planets through meteorite impacts.
