Posted on 05/10/2012 10:10:10 AM PDT by LibWhacker
Researchers say life-bearing planets may exist in vast numbers in the space between stars in the Milky Way
A few hundred thousand billion free-floating life-bearing Earth-sized planets may exist in the space between stars in the Milky Way. So argues an international team of scientists led by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, Director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham, UK. Their findings are published online in the Springer journal Astrophysics and Space Science.
The scientists have proposed that these life-bearing planets originated in the early Universe within a few million years of the Big Bang, and that they make up most of the so-called “missing mass” of galaxies. The scientists calculate that such a planetary body would cross the inner solar system every 25 million years on the average and during each transit, zodiacal dust, including a component of the solar system’s living cells, becomes implanted at its surface. The free-floating planets would then have the added property of mixing the products of local biological evolution on a galaxy-wide scale.
Since 1995, when the first extrasolar planet was reported, interest in searching for planets has reached a feverish pitch. The 750 or so detections of exoplanets are all of planets orbiting stars, and very few, if any, have been deemed potential candidates for life. The possibility of a much larger number of planets was first suggested in earlier studies where the effects of gravitational lensing of distant quasars by intervening planet-sized bodies were measured. Recently several groups of investigators have suggested that a few billion such objects could exist in the galaxy. Wickramasinghe and team have increased this grand total of planets to a few hundred thousand billion (a few thousand for every Milky Way star) - each one harbouring the legacy of cosmic primordial life.
Frozen ice ball planets can harbor life underneath a planetary ice cap 3.3 miles thick in a zone made habitable by the accumulated heat of radioactive decay for periods of 1 billoin to 10 billion years. Chemosyntheitc life forms do not require photosynthesis or a star to provide sunlight.
Microscopic life forms are found viable inside rock miles below the surface of the Earth, glacial ice thousands of years old, in salt rock 90 milloin years old, and on the camera lens of the Surveyor spacecraft on the surface of the moon years before being recovered by the Apollo Lunar explorers.
The by far more numerous population of rogue planets in inter-galactic space would be even far far less at risk of collisions in the vast space outside a galaxy.
What the astronomers are observing now is our galaxy having a speed of rotation in the outer arms which should be causing the stars in the outer arms to escape from the galaxy, but those stars are not doing so. The implicaton is that there is enough hidden mass in the galaxy to keep these stars in their galactic orbits.
I just read something not too long ago about the first stars in the universe. Apparently, there were many truly monster-sized stars that quickly supernovaed and threw out tremendous quantities of heavy elements, from which new generations of stars and planets formed. So there was a greater concentration of the heavier elements in the early universe than one might imagine.
“Any rock large enough to be shielding for life would be superheated by impacting a wandering planet again destroying that life.”
The rock heats on the surface and upper layers while remaining cold in the inner areas. The heat of resulting from friction upon atmospheric reentry most often causes the rock to fracture and breakup during reentry, leaving the cold interior portions of the rock relatively unsscathed and fallin to the surface exposed and relatively undamaged by any heat. In many cases, it is almost as if the process worked as a seeding process.
“So there was a greater concentration of the heavier elements in the early universe than one might imagine.”
Not to mention there was a whole lot less space separating these elements back then so accretion would have happened at a much faster clip than what’s happening today.
Organic molecules are present in comets. They presumably have formed in the cold extremes of space.
Which is just a little bit better science than looking at that same one square foot of sand and declaring that there must be elephants in Africa.
The first stars formed very quickly and often with vast supplies of matter to form a great many super-giant and hyper-giant Population I stars. These overly massive stars have correspondingly far shorter life spans and tend to supernova or hypernova in as little as a half-million years to a few million years.
Thanks. Like I said, I didn't know how long those would take so I didn't know if the original population I stars would have had their first supernovas yet.
. The chances of this common chemical reaction being absent within the trillions upon trillions of planets and planetoid environments appears to be virtually impossible.
There is a huge gap between absent everywhere and present everywhere. The author stated that life would be present everywhere with no evidence.
I had a professor who told his class that you can have one unproven speculation in a paper. If you put in more you might as well be writing a sci fi story. This story had a bunch of those speculations asserted as facts. I'll leave that for Art Bell.
Yes, but while circumgalactic orbit exists, it is far from stable. For example, check out the Spiral pattern rotation period:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density_wave_theory
A rogue planet would be far more at the mercy of any number of forces than would a solar system of a star. And even a slight vector would over the course of a billion years result in a very unstable body.
Is springer.com supposed to be a reliable source for science articles?
You’re treating it as if they were declaring an African elephant, whereas the paper is really speculating upon the likeliehood that the conditions they are observing could in their opinion of their observations support the possibility of African elephants, perhaps from the Ringling Bros circus on your very doorstep. Science fiction? Yes, but let’s not denigrate science fiction or demean it as no more than science fantasy. Science fiction has served us well. I recall attending a lecture at which the professor promised was to concern interstellar space travel. After going to great effort and cost to travel to this lecture, the professor spent the first ten minutes forcefully ridiculing any possibility of interstellar space travel and changed the subject to inorganic chemistry. Feeling cheated at the inconvenience of the ten minute denouncment of the subject of the two hour lecture, the temptation to shout from the back seats to refute the professor was overly tempting. Interstellar space travel is very possible even with relatively primitive technologies close to what exists at present. It only requies inter-generational space habitats using asteroidal habitats and a lot of time. Other forms of life could conceivably be much more at home in space and propogate across an entire galaxy within millions of years, which is a short time span within tens of billions of years.
I would love to see the source for your theory that there is a significant amount of inductive heat transfer from the sun to the earth.
Why wouldn’t more of them simply form like a star with star having the same orbital mechanics, while rogue planets ejectide from a planetary system would tend to be captured elsewhere or escape out of the galactic plane and into intergalactic space?
Or that our understanding of how gravity works is incomplete.
I’m perfectly willing to consider the possibility of dark matter, and the even more weird dark energy.
But to assume as a fact the existence of something we cannot see in order to make what we can see fit the theories is not a very scientific approach.
But that is a long way from "life bearing", unless the definition of the term considers such compounds as "seeds" that will continue on to form amino acids and such if and when they reach favorable conditions.
If one adheres to such theories anyway, which I do; that is, life is simply a consequence of physical law, albeit the most complex and still largely unexplained one.
Your hypothesis is based on an Earth like planet with an atmosphere which presupposes quite a bit for a wandering planet.
I think a wandering planet is likely to have its atmosphere blown away by wandering too close to a star.
I think a wandering star is also likely to be like Mars with a weak magnetic field (its core solidified billions of years ago) that does not protect its atmosphere from Solar wind and magnetic storms.
Without an atmosphere a large rock hit the surface of the planet at speed and is molten or vaporized by the force of the impact.
The very meaning of life is also too much in the infancy stage to be making conclusions about what is and is not possible. The exobiology studies of silicon based life forms and pathways is already brining into question many assumptions based upon the known life forms. There are likely to be pathways not yet even imagined yet.
But the universe does have a way of still pulling surprises. There is still so much we don't know (yet).
There are thirteen other planets with highly evolved dominant species like H. Sapiens. Some of them have evolved more along the lines of birds. One is reptilian-based.
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