Stardust - The Fountain of Life

Stardust - The Fountain of Life

The dust grains that travel through our solar system contain the vital components needed to form water. Similar dust grains are thought to be found all over the universe and this bodes well for the existence of life in other galaxies. Hope Ishii commented on the discovery, saying ‘it is a thrilling possibility that this influx of dust on…solar system bodies has acted as a continuous rainfall of little reaction vessels containing both the water and organics needed for the… origin of life’. This magic stardust is a result of many processes, though primarily the breakup of comets.

Particles extracted from the Earth’s stratosphere were found to contain minuscule pockets of water. The reason for this phenomenon is the product of a reaction between dust and solar wind. The dust is made mostly of silicates, which contain oxygen - as it travels through space; it meets the solar wind which is a stream of charged particles, including high energy hydrogen ions, ejected from the sun’s atmosphere. When the two collide, hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water.

Of course, this can’t solely account for the sheer mass of water that covers Earth today; a more probable origin is saturated asteroids that hit Earth billions of years ago. Nonetheless, the water producing reaction is likely to happen all over the cosmos wherever there is a star present. Furthermore, the interplanetary dust contains organic carbon which, too, is fundamental for life. If stardust contains carbon and water, ‘the essentials of life could be present in solar systems anywhere in the universe and raining down on their planets’.

Source: New Scientist