For Close-Knit Planets, Sharing Life Could Be Easy

[Judi Lynn]

By Starre Vartan, Astrobiology Magazine | November 4, 2018 07:35am ET

How could life be shared between planets in close proximity to one another? This question has received a greater insight thanks to new analytics based on previously known and new calculations.

The findings from this new research are helping scientists understand how likely life would be on a given planet in such tight-knit systems if that world shows signs of habitability.

This approach began with a blasphemous-at-the-time idea: that life exists throughout the universe and can travel without supernatural interference. Anaxagoras, a 5th-century B.C. Greek philosopher, called this concept "panspermia." Kelvin, Helmholtz and Arrhenius advanced the idea in the 19th and 20th centuries by examining how life could be carried to and from Earth. In 2009, Stephen Hawking went beyond our solar system with the idea when he suggested that "life could spread from planet to planet or from stellar system to stellar system, carried on meteors." [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life]

Dimitri Veras, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick in England and lead author of a recent paper on the subject, said, "Within the last century, [panspermia] has been focused on life transport within the solar system, including Earth."

More:
https://www.space.com/42339-alien-life-panspermia-trappist-1-exoplanets.html?utm_source=notification