{"id":605,"date":"2008-09-04T02:50:57","date_gmt":"2008-09-04T07:50:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=605"},"modified":"2008-09-04T04:00:57","modified_gmt":"2008-09-04T09:00:57","slug":"could-life-have-come-from-other-stars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=605","title":{"rendered":"Could life have come from other stars?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/exo-planet-life.jpg\" title=\"exo-planet-life.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/exo-planet-life.thumbnail.jpg\" alt=\"exo-planet-life.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Late in the last century, researchers calculated that an asteroid impact on Mars could jettison rocks \u00a0towards Earth in a way that preserved bacterial life within them; the implication being that life could have evolved first on a warmer wetter Mars and later seeded life on Earth.<\/p>\n<p>Now\u00a0Mauri Valtonen from Turku University in Finland and colleagues\u00a0have worked out whether bacteria might have been able to make a similar journey from a planet orbiting another star.The answer is probably not.<\/p>\n<p>But there is with one important caveat.The sun almost certainly formed in a star-birthing nursery with various other stars which later dispersed. It&#8217;s quite possible, say the team, that bacteria could have passed from one system to another while all these star systems were close together.<\/p>\n<p>Nobody knows which stars are the sun&#8217;s sisters and brothers but various groups are looking to solve this conundrum. In particular, the \u00a0European Space Agency&#8217;s Gaia observatory (launch date 2011) \u00a0is designed to create a 3D map of our galaxy that should allow us to work out what came from where.\u00a0Studying these stars will then become an obsession for various astronomers.<\/p>\n<p>Equally likely, of course, is the possibility that Earth seeded planets around these stars with life.So if you work\u00a0on Gaia, don&#8217;t be surprised to find somebody staring right back at us.<\/p>\n<p>Ref:<a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0809.0378\">arxiv.org\/abs\/0809.0378<\/a>\u00a0: Natural Transfer of Viable Microbes in Space from Planets in the Extra-Solar Systems to a Planet in our Solar System and Vice-Versa<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Late in the last century, researchers calculated that an asteroid impact on Mars could jettison rocks \u00a0towards Earth in a way that preserved bacterial life within them; the implication being that life could have evolved first on a warmer wetter Mars and later seeded life on Earth. Now\u00a0Mauri Valtonen from Turku University in Finland and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fightin","category-slimey-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}