Previously, the team led by Alan Marshall, Ph.D., investigated complex mixtures of organic materials found on Earth, including petroleum. But now, they are turning their attention toward the skies, or the things that have fallen from them. Their ultra-high resolution mass spectrometry (MS) technique is starting to reveal new information about the universe and could ultimately provide a window into the origin of life itself.

“This analysis gives us an idea of what’s out there, what we’re going to run into as we move forward as a ‘spacefaring’ species,” says Joseph Frye-Jones, a graduate student who is presenting the work at the meeting. Both Marshall and Frye-Jones are at Florida State University and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.

To make sense of the complicated jumble of molecules on the meteorites, the scientists turned to MS. This technique blasts a sample apart into tiny particles, then basically reports the mass of each one, represented as a peak. By analyzing the collection of peaks, or the spectrum, scientists can learn what was in the original sample. But in many cases, the resolution of the spectrum is only good enough to confirm the presence of a compound that was already presumed to be there, rather than providing information about unknown components.

This is where Fourier-transform ion cyclotron resonance (FT-ICR) MS comes in, which is also known as “ultra-high resolution” MS. It can analyze incredibly complex mixtures with very high levels of resolution and accuracy. It’s especially well suited for analyzing mixtures, like petroleum, or the complex organic material extracted from a meteorite. “With this instrument, we really have the resolution to look at everything in many kinds of samples,” says Frye-Jones.

The researchers extracted the organic material from samples of the Aguas Zarcas meteorite, then analyzed it with ultra-high resolution MS. Rather than analyzing only one specific class of molecules at a time, such as amino acids, they chose to look at all soluble organic material at once.

This provided the team with more than 30,000 peaks for a meteorite to analyze, and over 60% of them could be given a unique molecular formula. Frye-Jones says these results represent the first analysis of this type on the Aguas Zarcas meteorite. In fact, this team identified nearly twice as many molecular formulas as previously reported for the older meteorite.

Once determined, the data were sorted into unique groups based on various characteristics, such as whether they included oxygen or sulfur, or whether they potentially contained a ring structure or double bonds. They were surprised to find a large amount of oxygen content among the compounds. “You don’t think of oxygen-containing organics as being a big part of meteorites,” explained Marshall.