Circa January 2018. A fireball meteorite lands near Strawberry Lake in Hamburg Michigan. Fragments from the meteorite are immediately pounced upon by a team of international researchers while the crash is still fresh.

Back to present day: Researchers release data from that meteorite fragment that reveals over 2,000 extraterrestrial organic compounds that traveled through deep space for millions of years and now could lead scientist to better understand the origins of not only Earth but our entire solar system.

The study reported that the compounds could have seeded the emergence of microbial life on our planet.  Now more studies are needed but if found to hold true to theory, meteorites are responsible for giving birth to life on Earth and elsewhere in space.

"When we're looking at these meteorites, we're looking at something that's close to the material when it formed early in the solar system's history,"  Live Science

The researchers were lucky in that most meteorites that enter the Earth's atmosphere are coated over with a ionized crust and their original composition is compromised but Meteorites that are high in iron and have undergone what's called a "thermal metamorphism" keep to their original composition and are commonly known as an "H4" and are found to be very rare. The fragment found in Strawberry Lake in Michigan was categorized as an H4.

So did this meteorite bring extraterrestrial life to our planet? I think it did and has for millions of years brought the seeds to extraterrestrial life. Sure seems logical that extraterrestrial organic compounds that find themselves in the right environment, like the planet Earth, that life would seed, grow and thrive.

Findings published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science.