Researchers are one step closer to answering one of life's biggest mysteries after discovering a chiral molecule in interstellar space.
These chiral molecules are the essential building blocks for life on earth and human biology as we know it.
Different from normal molecules, chiral molecules lack a plane or centre of symmetry and they come in two different formats, left or right handed.
Now it seems that these distinct molecules may have actually originated in outer space after a team of scientists from Harvard University and the National Radio Observatory made a surprising discovery.
The researchers have been using radio telescopes to scan for molecular patterns in the Milky Way and have now located one of the smallest chiral molecular pattens inside an oxide gas cloud.
The cloud, which was approximately eight thousand light years away from earth, shares molecular detail with meteorites on Earth and may be the first organic source of those here on our planet.