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#panspermia

1 post1 participant0 posts today
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Mikko Tuomi

Interstellar material has been discovered in our Solar System, yet its origins and details of transport are unknown.

But how much of that #interstellar matter originates in the nearest #star system, the α Centauri triple system?

If α Centauri ejects material similarly to own Solar System, the current number of α Centauri particles larger than 100 m in diameter within the Oort Cloud is a million.

But only one of them can be expected within 10 AU.

#astronomy #panspermia
arxiv.org/abs/2502.03224

arXiv.orgA Case Study of Interstellar Material Delivery: α CentauriInterstellar material has been discovered in our Solar System, yet its origins and details of its transport are unknown. Here we present $α$ Centauri as a case study of the delivery of interstellar material to our Solar System. $α$ Centauri is a mature triple star system that likely harbours planets and is moving towards us with the point of closest approach approximately 28,000 years in the future. Assuming a current ejection model for the system, we find that such material can reach our Solar System and may currently be present here. The material that does reach us is mostly a product of low ($<2$ km/s) ejection velocities, and the rate at which it enters our Solar System is expected to peak around the time of $α$ Centauri 's closest approach. If $α$ Centauri ejects material at a rate comparable to our own Solar System, we estimate the current number of $α$ Centauri particles larger than 100 m in diameter within our Oort Cloud to be $10^{6}$, and during $α$ Centauri 's closest approach, this will increase by an order of magnitude. However, the observable fraction of such objects remains low as there is only a probability of $10^{-6}$ that one of them is within 10 au of the Sun. A small number ($\sim 10$) meteors greater than 100 micrometers from $α$ Centauri may currently be entering Earth's atmosphere every year: this number is very sensitive to the assumed ejected mass distribution, but the flux is expected to increase as $α$ Centauri approaches.
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janggolan

Scientists say they’ve traced the origins of a potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroid to the far side of the moon…
cnn.com/2024/05/01/world/lunar
Understanding how such a giant chunk of the #moon could remain intact enough to become an #asteroid could help scientists studying #panspermia, or the idea that the ingredients for life may have been delivered to #Earth as “organic hitchhikers” on #space rocks such as asteroids, #comets or other #planets.

Replied in thread
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qurlyjoe

@ScienceScholar
At first I thought, ooh, maybe a kind of #panspermia, and would that mean, if there are other life forms in the universe, then maybe we’re all “related” to some degree.
But then I thought, no, they’re saying this stuff is happening in our solar system, so there might still be something unique about us.
Can our telescopes detect this stuff, or evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, of its existence?
That would be promising.

Continued thread
Public
Spaceflight 🚀

Inert, sleeping #bacteria 🦠 can survive for centuries, without nutrients, resisting heat, UV #radiation, antibiotics and other harsh chemicals. Switching on of metabolic processes after centuries of dormancy 💤. In response to nutrients, the conduit, a membrane channel, opens, allowing ions to escape from the #spore interior. This initiates a cascade of reactions that allow the dormant cell to shed its protective armor and resume growth hms.harvard.edu/news/how-dorma

hms.harvard.eduHow Dormant Bacteria Return to LifeSolution to long-standing mystery of bacterial spores illuminates new paths for disease prevention
#panspermia
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S. R. Eller

#Europa is in the news again now that JWST found CO2 coming from it. Since DNA studies indicate that life is 11 billion years old and has origins in #panspermia, my bet is that we find distantly related sea life (LUCA Prime!) with bioluminescent crabs and sponges. There was probably an oxygenation event from radiosynthethesizing cyanobacteria since #Jupiter has so much.

youtu.be/pEJ-wXpeH6w?si=v8GUoy

YouTubeLife on Europa?By PBS Space Time
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Doc Edward Morbius ⭕​

What if the Goldilocks Zone was everywhere?

It once was.

Kurzgesagt explores a fascinating hypothesis: For a period from about 10 to 17 million years after the Big Bang, the average temperature of the entire Universe was between 0C and 100C, that is, where liquid water could form, known as "the Goldilocks Zone": not too hot, not too cold, just right.

yewtu.be/watch?v=JOiGEI9pQBs

Additionally:

  • The first giant stars would have already zipped through their hydrogen fuel forming the essential elements of life and blasting that through the interstellar medium: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur (along with, of course, hydrogen, itself primordial).

  • By at least one measure, evolution of DNA suggests a biological origin at roughly this time.

  • Life seems to have emerged on Earth roughly the instant conditions were favourable for it (e.g., the Floor Was Not Literally Lava, and liquid oceans formed).

It's been a long time since I've run across a staggeringly original and at least arguably plausible concept. This one ... makes my head spin. This isn't the first time I've run across the concept of panspermia --- the notion that life emerged effectively everywhere. It is the first time I've seen a plausible argument made supporting the notion.

Questions are how the idea might be supported or disproved. Multiple biological samples from extrasolar objects, particularly of both different directional origin and showing a common biological ancestor, might suggest this. Life on other bodies within the solar system could also strengthen the argument as might be signs of strongly distinct and advanced early life forms on Earth, suggesting distinct origins as the primordial Earth was "seeded" by organic forms of independent origin. Contra arguments might be indications that the early Universe was exposed to too much ionising radiation for stable organic and genetic material to have formed.

Sources and papers are listed here: sites.google.com/view/sources-

See especially: L Loeb, A. (2014): "The habitable epoch of the early Universe". International Journal of Astrobiology, vol. 13, 4." cambridge.org/core/journals/in

Non-paywalled: arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613 (h/t @johncarlosbaez)

#Kurzgesagt#OriginOfLife#Panspermia
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Bo Jacobs

"Inside Ancient Asteroids, Gamma Rays Made Building Blocks of Life. A new radiation-based mechanism adds to the ways that amino acids could have been made in space and brought to the young Earth."

Quanta: quantamagazine.org/inside-anci

"Last spring, scientists revealed that the chemical composition of the asteroid includes 10 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.

But where did these amino acids come from? The amino acids flowing through our ecosystems are products of cellular metabolism, mostly in plants. What nonbiological mechanism could have put them in meteorites and asteroids?

Scientists have thought of several ways, and recent work by researchers in Japan points to a significant new one: a mechanism that uses gamma rays to forge amino acids. Their discovery makes it seem even more likely that meteorites could have contributed to the origin of life on Earth."

Graphic of comets as linked into a molecule
#DNA#originsoflife#panspermia
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