New Jersey meteorite contains organic compounds from ancient proto-planet

Billions of years before life stirred on Earth, a small world formed in the chaos of the early solar system, built its own chemistry, and was eventually destroyed — yet it did not disappear entirely. A fragment of that lost proto-planet fell through the sky above New Jersey, punched into a residential home, and delivered to waiting scientists a cache of organic molecules that predate our planet itself. The discovery offers rare, uncontaminated evidence for one of science's most enduring questions: how the chemical ingredients of life came to exist here, and whether the cosmos itself is, in som