Ryugu is another asteroid for which we have a sample, collected by the Hayabusa-2 mission. Despite their differences, Ryugu and Bennu also share similarities, and Ryugu, too, had plenty of organic materials, simply not as much of them.

Bennu’s parent body seems to have formed from a really different set of materials from across the Solar System, and it might have formed further away from the Sun, too.

“We’re looking at unique snapshot of the outer solar system at the birth of our Sun,” said Professor Sara Russell, planetary scientist at the Natural History Museum, and co-author on the paper. “Some of these grains have survived billions of years of solar system evolution almost untouched and can tell us more about the environment in which planets were born.”