Overview
- The peer-reviewed study, published Tuesday in Nature Astronomy by UC Riverside and Weizmann scientists, reports a statistical signature that separates biological from abiotic chemistry.
- The authors caution that the statistic alone cannot prove extraterrestrial life and must be weighed with other independent evidence and planetary context.
- The approach borrows biodiversity metrics from ecology, using molecular richness and evenness to spot life-like organization in chemical inventories.
- Applied to about 100 datasets from microbes, soils, fossils, meteorites, asteroids, and lab syntheses, the method reliably sorted living from nonliving samples.
- Amino acids from biology were more diverse and evenly spread, fatty acids from nonliving processes were more even than biological ones, and the signal persisted in degraded material such as fossilized dinosaur eggshells, with potential to be tested on Mars and icy-moon mission data.