Scientists have found tiny bubbles of organic material that may be older than the sun, in a meteorite that landed on a frozen lake in northwest British Columbia.

NASA researchers say the ancient globules add weight to the theory that space rocks delivered the raw materials required for the evolution of the first life forms on Earth.

"The globules we found in the meteorite aren't alive but can be an ingredient for it," said Keiko Nakamura-Messenger, who works at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

"We may be one step closer to knowing where our ancestors came from."

She and her colleagues released a detailed chemical analysis of the microscopic globules found within the charcoal-like space rocks that landed near the British Columbia-Yukon border in January 2000.

The bubbles contain rare types of hydrogen and nitrogen that are not found on Earth. They were formed in intense cold, Nakamura-Messenger said, either in the outer reaches of our nascent solar system or in the giant cloud of cosmic dust and gas that gave birth to our sun and the planets that orbit it.

In this week's edition of the journal Science, they say these kinds of globules were likely found in many of the meteorites that bombarded the young Earth. They may have provided the building blocks for life and the perfect protected bubble-like environment for it to form. There were millions of globules in the grape-like piece of rock she studied.

No one is sure how life first evolved on Earth. But the general scientific theory is that compounds that were either already here — or that arrived on space rocks — eventually combined and gave rise to a single-celled organism.

Scientists have reported finding these kinds of globules in other meteorites for years, but it was unclear whether they were extraterrestrial material, or the result of human or other earthly contamination.

Peter Brown, a planetary scientist at the University of Western Ontario, was also on the team that studied the meteorite after it landed. He and his colleagues sent a small sample to NASA, which is what Dr. Nakamura-Messenger and her colleagues used for their research.

But the Americans had access to expensive new equipment that can analyze the chemical composition of tiny structures like the globules, Brown said.

That analysis shows that the globules are among the oldest material ever found. The bulk of the meteorite is believed to be roughly 4.5 billion years old. The globules could be even more ancient, material that was incorporated into the rock when it formed.

The most pristine chunks are now sitting in a freezer at the University of Alberta, said Chris Herd, assistant professor in the department of Earth and atmospheric sciences.

Many of the pieces look different than the one the NASA scientists examined, he said, and may contain their own secrets.

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Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.