A new paper examines panspermia and suggests that dust particles may escape the gravity of their host planets and travel across the galaxy, planting life on other planets.

There are various ideas about how life arose on Earth, and the most likely is that it originated in hydrothermal vents in the oceans billions of years ago. However, not all theories see Earth as the place where life on Earth began. A theory that still leaves us with the problem of how First The emergence of life means that life may have moved throughout the solar system, perhaps even across the galaxy.

The idea known as panspermia has existed in various forms for centuries, but was named by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in the early 1900s. Arrhenius suggested that small dust particles containing living organisms could be carried out of the planet’s atmosphere and then pushed into space by the pressure of solar radiation.

Regardless of whether life, even resilient life, could survive the arduous journey, various astronomers have tried to estimate how long it would take for life to spread from a planet in this way. One of the teams concluded that it would take life about 20 days to reach Mars from Earth, 14 months to reach Neptune, and 9,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri. conditions

Previous studies have shown that small amounts of dust particles at high altitudes can gain escape velocity by colliding with cosmic dust particles as they begin their journey through space. In a new preprint paper that has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, physicist Zaza N. Osmanov attempted to calculate the spread of this life across the galaxy (if it could indeed survive the journey). According to the article, traveling this way seems quite convenient, despite the long distances.

“We looked at the dynamics of planetary dust particles ‘moving’ between planets and it has been shown that dust particles can travel for over 5 billion years. [міжзоряному середовищі] At a distance of several hundred light years,” concluded Osmanov. “Taking into account the distribution density of stars, we found that the dust particles emitted by each planet will reach 10. ⁵ star systems”.

Despite this intriguing idea, Osmanov also found problems for proponents of the concept of panspermia; dense molecular clouds can trap planetary dust as they fly through the galaxy. But the Fermi Paradox, as always, may be a bigger problem.

“When the problem was analyzed in the context of the Drake equation, it was found that the minimum number of planets in the Milky Way on which life could arise should be on the order of 3×10.⁷– Osmanov wrote, – it means that the entire galaxy will be filled with dust particles with complex molecules.”

For this life to take hold, it would still have to be on planets with favorable conditions, but according to this study, if there is life there, it must be seeding other life elsewhere, forcing us to ask the question once again: Where is everyone?