For people like me who suspect "life" is seeded in outerspace then brought to the infinate number of planetory bodies within the universe by comets got a boost today as NASA announced it's early report on comet dust that has been returned to earth after a 7 year round trip.
NASA's Stardust Findings May Alter View of Comet Formation
Comets are born of fire as well as ice, the first results from the US space agency's (Nasa) Stardust mission show.
Scientists have long thought of comets as cold, billowing clouds of ice, dust and gases formed on the edges of the solar system. But comets may not be so simple or similar. They may prove to be diverse bodies with complex histories. Comet Wild 2 seems to have had a more complex history than thought.
Hawain beach sand present on comet temple - 2
As strange as it may sound, Olivine is the primary component of the green sand found on some Hawaiian beaches. It is among the most common minerals in the universe, but scientists were surprised to find it in cometary dust. Olivine is a compound of iron, magnesium and other elements. The Stardust sample is primarily magnesium. Along with olivine, the dust from Wild 2 contains high-temperature minerals rich in calcium, aluminum and titanium.
This is the very first basic analysis. Over the coming months we should see a whole host of new discoveries, I wander how good it is going to get:
below, a tiny dust particle one of thousands brought back on valentines day.
Steve - Yes well if any of those two possibilitys were actually true without devine intervention, I'd put my money on the comet bringing life itself since I'm having a real hard time imagening it being formed in teh heat of collision.
The fine line between abiogenesis & panspermia. You are right though in concluding that "if" life can be spread around the universe via the theory of panspermia which is very credible then abiogenesis still needs to discover how the first life (or any kind of life) can form using the raw ingredients of the universe, Perhaps the new findings may give science some revealing clues.
Steve - But this of course begs the quetsion, where did the comet got it from?
Totally agree...... i don't think "life" has been discovered, news like that would already be out. Looks like we are going to be treated to a whole new story very soon a story of the raw ingredients, where they came from and how they formed. The idea that some of the "stuff" is not even from our solar system is very very exciting.
Many of them seem to be in remarkably good condition: fluffy, fragile grains that somehow entered the atmosphere without vaporising or melting. Presumably they arrived slowly
A REMOTE region of Antarctica has yielded what may be the best-preserved comet dust yet found, perhaps in better condition than the samples NASA's Stardust mission brought back from a comet's tail. A team of meteorite experts led by Jean Duprat of the University of Paris South, France, found the dust in snow collected near Concordia base, high on the Antarctic plateau. When they melted the snow and filtered out anything more than 25 micrometres across, almost a third of the particles they found were from space. "It's the only place on Earth where you've got this number," Duprat says. Preliminary tests show that some of the particles have a composition close to what one would expect from comet dust.
pamspermia (the idea that life on planets such as Earth was seeded from space) took another boost this week with the idea that seeding of life would not require a lift on a meteor as it's only means of inter-solar travel or even Galactic travel.
a new study suggests there may be a much gentler and steadier way for microbial life to leave a planet and travel to other worlds - and even from one solar system to another, something even the biggest impacts could not do.
The startling conclusion grew out of work by Tom Dehel, an electrical engineer at the US Federal Aviation Administration, who was investigating how electromagnetic fields in the Earth's atmosphere can affect GPS satellites and disrupt their use for aircraft navigation. He presented his findings at the biennial meeting of the international Committee on Space Research (COSPAR), in Beijing, China, this week.
Dehel calculated the effect of electric fields at various levels in the atmosphere on a bacterium that was carrying an electric charge. He showed that such bacteria could easily be ejected from the Earth's gravitational field by the same kind of electromagnetic fields that generate auroras.
I believe we can all agree that the universe is very big and is very diverse. I believe it is a safe assumption to say that if it is possible for something to happen, it probably has already happened some place.
We may give different reasons as to WHY events occur and why things are as they appear. But, we can not deny the fact that the univers is a very woderful place.
Yes, I believe there is life in many places besides earth. I also believe there will be life forms we will never be able to see or have tangible evidence of.
To myself this is evidence of the grander of Allah(swt), to others it may be evidence of the natural order of physical interactions.
We each will have our own conclusions based on what we know and on what we have faith in.
Scientists Gaining Clearer Picture Of Comet Makeup And Origin
When the above probe sent an dead weight into the path of a comet, much was anticipated about the result which included the release of 250,000 tonnes of water.
Spitzer's infrared spectrograph closely observed the materials ejected from Tempel 1 when Deep Impact's probe dove into the comet's surface. Astronomers spotted the signatures of solid chemicals never seen before in comets, such as carbonates (chalk) and smectite (clay), metal sulfides (like Fool's Gold), and carbon-containing molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, found in barbecue grills or automobile exhaust on Earth.
Clay and carbonates were surprises because they typically require liquid water to make -- and liquid water isn't found in the regions of deep space where comets form. We do know water is now very common:
Also surprising was the superabundance of crystalline silicates, material formed only at red-hot temperatures found inside the orbit of Mercury.
"In the same body, you have material formed in the inner solar system, where water can be liquid, and frozen material from out by Uranus and Neptune," Lisse says. "Except for the lightest elements, the total abundances of atoms in the comet are practically the same as makes up the Sun. It implies there was a great deal of churning in the primordial solar system, with high- and low-temperature materials mixing over great distances."
The idea that comets delivered the chemical "seeds" for life to the early Earth has been given a big boost. Scientists studying the tiny grains of material recovered from Comet Wild-2 by Nasa's Stardust mission have found large, complex carbon-rich molecules.
"These results show that comets could have delivered nitrogen rich organic compounds to the early Earth where they would have been available for the origin of life," said Scott Sandford of NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
"That's of interest because we know that in laboratory simulations where we irradiate ice analogues of types we know are out there, these same experiments produce a lot of organic compounds, including amino acids and a class of compounds called amphiphiles which if you put them in water will spontaneously form a membrane so that they make little cellular-like structures."
NASA Study Finds New Kind of Organics in Stardust Mission
Our studies of the comet dust show that the organics are very rich in oxygen and nitrogen," Sandford said. "The data are not incompatible with some of it being in the PAHs, but we still have a lot to learn in this area."
Although some of the other organics captured by the Stardust spacecraft look somewhat similar to the fairly stable organics found in meteorites, Sandford noted that many of the organic compounds appear to be very volatile. One sample even showed an abundance of material containing alcohols.
Many scientists believe that comets are largely made of the original material from which our solar system formed and could contain pre-solar system, interstellar grains. According to scientists, continued analysis of these celestial specks may well yield important insights into the evolution of the sun, its planets and possibly, even the origin of life.
Stardust Findings Suggest Comets More Complex Than Thought
One of the major discoveries from the analysis of the comet samples was finding particles rich in organic matter. "Comets are believed to have brought water and organic matter to the early Earth, and it is important to understand the nature of these materials because they are necessary ingredients for the origin of life," said Lindsay Keller, NASA scientist at JSC and Stardust co-investigator. "One of the first analyses we obtained on the samples showed abundant hydrocarbons in many of the particles."
Subsequent analyses revealed that some of the organic matter formed in the cold cloud of dust and gas that was the precursor to the solar system.
More evidence suggests that comet Collisions between comets may be kicking up copious amounts of dust observed around a dead star. This again demonstrates the turbulent role played by comets in exchanging raw materials around planetary formations and spreading them throughout space:
Collisions between comets may be kicking up copious amounts of dust observed around a dead star. This has surprised astronomers, because when the star died and expelled its outer layers, the dust in this system should have been blown away.
A favoured explanation is that the dust is being freshly churned up by comets smashing into each other in the outer fringes of the white dwarf's system.
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