51����

IT’S blamed for obliterating the dinosaurs, but that famous asteroid or comet
impact did more—it sprinkled buckyballs containing extraterrestrial gases
all over the Earth. 51����s say this backs the idea that earlier impacts
enriched the primeval soup of organic chemicals that gave rise to life.

Several years ago, Luann Becker and Jeffrey Bada of the Scripps Institution
of Oceanography in San Diego found buckyballs—tiny cages of carbon
atoms—in the debris of an impact crater in Canada. Trapped inside these 60
and 70-carbon molecules was a mixture of helium isotopes more typical of
interstellar space than Earth’s atmosphere,…