This heating would have kept the bodies warm enough for liquid water to exist in their interiors for a periods of perhaps some millions of years. The total volume of these could have been quite large, and offers the interesting possibility that life originated in our Solar System in one of these bodies, not on Earth itself. If so, this could explain why life appeared on Earth so early: if OoL tends to occur in such bodies, it either happens early (before they freeze up) or it doesn't occur at all. This would counter the inference that because life originated early on Earth, OoL must be a high probability event.
The presence of phosphate minerals is mildly promising as phosphate is somewhat rare and is biologically essential in nucleic acids, ATP, and some cell membranes.
Either way, the notion of asteroids being more hospitable to OoL than planets, with their complex and varied environments and chemistry, would require quite the extraordinary evidence in my book.
It wouldn't be necessary for a life bearing asteroid to hit Earth in order to seed Earth. Rather, a collision of a life-bearing asteroid (perhaps since frozen) in space would create a large number of fragments, any one of which could seed Earth. This strikes me as the most certain part of the scenario. After all, this is how meteorites are created.
I really don't think it is. For any favorable condition you might find in asteroids, early planets can probably match it, and a bunch of other possible conditions besides, with the additional benefit of not requiring a stage where the nascent life has to survive an impact at orbital speeds, subsequent flight through cold irradiated vacuum, and then re-entry through a dense planetary atmosphere. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'm saying it needs a lot more evidence to take it seriously.
It's hard to imagine any such reason. Honestly I don't think there's any to find. But it's still an open question.
Unless there is some solid proof that life happened on Earth well before larger bodies of water formed, I'd go for the most obvious theory - biggest stable body of water around and that is our pretty unique planet.
Your idea fixes that for me.
The realization that meteorites come from multiple different parent bodies is that they are distributed widely, not all on one line on this plot. Bennu, like primitive meteorites, appears to be off the terrestrial line.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20240000340/downloads/Fr...
> Bennu's basic mineralogy and chemical nature would have been established during the first 10 million years of the Solar System's formation [...]
> Bennu probably began in the inner asteroid belt as a fragment from a larger body with a diameter of 100 km. Simulations suggest a 70% chance it came from the Polana family and a 30% chance it derived from the Eulalia family. Impactors on boulders of Bennu indicate that Bennu has been in near Earth orbit (separated from the main asteroid belt) for 1–2.5 million years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101955_Bennu#Origin_and_evolut...
It's really too bad we weren't able to get a sample from the ['Oumuamua](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua) asteroid when it flew through the system. It was definitely an extra-solar asteroid, so it would have had material completely unrelated to our own system's formation and history.
How are they able to tell that?
The only way a widmanst pattern forms is by slow cooling of the iron over millions of years. Check out the wiki section on why it can't be reproduced in a lab
