Murchison Meteorite

You're looking at a surviving portion of the Murchison meteorite, a famous and much-studied meteorite that fell in Murchison, Australia, in 1969. It is one of the oldest known remnants of solar system from a time before the formation of our planet Earth. It is a type of meteorite called carbonaceous chondrite and was found to contain an extraordinary variety of organic molecules including amino acids and sugars. These organic compounds were the building blocks of life and the Murchison meteorite was the first evidence that many of these compounds orginated elsewhere in outer space.