Space Dust Could Have Transported Alien Insects To Earth

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According to new research, space dust could have transported alien insects to Earth and terrestrial microbes to other planets in the universe. The scientists in Edinburgh have studied flows of interplanetary dust, which can travel in the space at up to 43.75 miles per second, and they have come up with the theory of space dust transporting microbes to other planets from our Earth. They determined that bio-particles that are floating high in the atmosphere at an altitude of 93 miles or more could have been released from Earth’s gravity by space dust.

Special types of bacteria, plants, and even tiny micro-animals that are called tardigrades have been known to be capable of surviving in space. That being said, the same event could have occurred in reverse, which means that the space dust could have brought interstellar bugs to Earth, which then led to a possibility of seeding life on our planet, according to the scientists

“The proposition that space dust collisions could propel organisms over enormous distances between planets raises some exciting prospects of how life and the atmospheres of planets originated. The streaming of fast space dust is found throughout planetary systems and could be a common factor in proliferating life,” said Professor Arjun Berera, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Physics and Astronomy, as quoted by Daily Mail.

Before, scientists had believed that the impacting asteroids and comets imported life to Earth. Earlier this year, researchers from Columbia University said that life came to Earth from an asteroid that traveled from Mars. The radical theory, called Panspermia, was first mentioned in 1871 and has since spread among the scientific community. That theory suggests that a long, long time ago, Mars supported right conditions for life, which included water and atmosphere.

Scientists believe that an asteroid collision resulted in a small part of life from Mars came to Earth.

Caleb Scharf, astronomer and director of the multidisciplinary Columbia Astrobiology Centre at Columbia University told Business Insider, “We can find pieces of Mars here on Earth, and we suspect that there are pieces of Earth on Mars. If that material can carry living organisms on it, it’s possible that we are Martian.”

Although Panspermia is not a new theory, it has finally gained support from the scientists and astronomers who discovered that the universe is full of organic compounds. Still, there is no evidence which confirms the Panspermia theory. The new research has been published in the journal Astrobiology and was partly funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council.

So could space dust transport alien insects to Earth? What do you think about this theory?

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