The Sharing of Life by Planets

Often a question is raised by various scientists and researchers that – Can life be shared between planets? This question has received insights and answers from very learned minds so far. A new research has been conducted in that behalf. It has been found that this research is helping the scientists largely in understanding the movement of life from one planet to another. Anaxagoras was a 5th-century B.C. Greek philosopher who called the idea of life travelling without any supernatural interference as "panspermia”.

Later, Kelvin, Helmholtz and Arrhenius also gave their inputs concerning the travelling of life from one planet to another. In the year 2009, Stephen Hawking, travelled beyond the solar system with the idea when he suggested that "life could spread from planet to planet or from stellar system to stellar system, carried on meteors”. On the other hand, Dimitri Veras, who is an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick in England and lead author of a recent paper on the subject stated that “Within the last century, [panspermia] has been focused on life transport within the solar system, including Earth." It is believed that the TRAPPIST-1 solar system, which is 39 light-years from Earth and includes seven planets, packed into an orbit smaller than Mercury's, changes this Earth-centric idea. This makes the system an appropriate model for exploring the idea of panspermia. As per the paper published by Veras- there is clear cut evidence of the fact that life can survive the three stages of travelling from one planet to another. These include: initial ejection; the journey through space between planets and impact onto a new planet. In order to understand the possibility of ejected material travelling from one planet to another, Veras combined his equations into analytics. Veras was of the view that usually panspermia is studied with numerical simulations but these are slow to run and derive results. Therefore, analytics is used as it is much faster to use and are general enough. It is very important for the researchers to not limit their research to what is already known. The difficulty is that the experiments that the researchers are conducting are based on those organisms that we are familiar with. The researchers are absolutely blank about how the extra solar organisms are like. Hence, it can be said that there is a big world of possibilities that stands before the researchers.

By: Anuja Arora

Content: https://www.space.com/42339-alien-life-panspermia-trappist-1-exoplanets.html