“[P]articles of inorganic dust can become organised into helical structures. These structures can then interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and life itself.”

This may give a whole new meaning to the term smart dust ….

V.N. Tsytovich of the General Physics Institute, Russian Academy of Science, in Moscow, working with colleagues there and at the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany and the University of Sydney, Australia, has studied the behaviour of complex mixtures of inorganic materials in a plasma. Plasma is essentially the fourth state of matter beyond solid, liquid and gas, in which electrons are torn from atoms leaving behind a miasma of charged particles.

Until now, physicists assumed that there could be little organisation in such a cloud of particles. However, Tsytovich and his colleagues demonstrated, using a computer model of molecular dynamics, that particles in a plasma can undergo self-organization as electronic charges become separated and the plasma becomes polarized. This effect results in microscopic strands of solid particles that twist into corkscrew shapes, or helical structures. These helical strands are themselves electronically charged and are attracted to each other.

Quite bizarrely, not only do these helical strands interact in a counterintuitive way in which like can attract like, but they also undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers. They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbours and they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma.

So, could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be somehow alive? “These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter,” says Tsytovich, “they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve”.

[Link]

Abtract

Complex plasmas may naturally self-organize themselves into stable interacting helical structures that exhibit features normally attributed to organic living matter. The self-organization is based on non-trivial physical mechanisms of plasma interactions involving over-screening of plasma polarization. As a result, each helical string composed of solid microparticles is topologically and dynamically controlled by plasma fluxes leading to particle charging and over-screening, the latter providing attraction even among helical strings of the same charge sign. These interacting complex structures exhibit thermodynamic and evolutionary features thought to be peculiar only to living matter such as bifurcations that serve as `memory marks’, self-duplication, metabolic rates in a thermodynamically open system, and non-Hamiltonian dynamics. We examine the salient features of this new complex `state of soft matter’ in light of the autonomy, evolution, progenity and autopoiesis principles used to define life. It is concluded that complex self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter that may exist in space provided certain conditions allow them to evolve naturally.

Article @ New Journal of Physics.

Via Boing Boing: “The experiments took place under simulated plasma conditions, representative of space and also the primordial Earth.”

Via Times Online: “Dust ‘comes alive’ in space”

As Above, So Below

A rock falls from orbit, reaching the earth as a meteorite. Can organic compounds survive the journey?

[T]he unmanned Foton M3 mission will carry 35 ESA experiments in life and physical sciences, including a rock experiment designed by Professor John Parnell, Chair in Geology & Petroleum Geology, from the University of Aberdeen.

… “The objective behind this is to look at the rock’s behaviour when it is exposed during re-entry through the Earth’s atmosphere — when temperatures are extreme. This will tell us something about the likelihood of life being transferred between planets on meteorites.

“The Orkney rock is a very robust material but it will be interesting to see if organic matter in the rock is robust enough to survive the harsh conditions endured during re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere.”

[University of Aberdeen: Link]

Via Universe Today: “One of most intriguing, and controversial, theories astrobiology is the concept of Panspermia. This idea proposes that life on Earth might have began on another planet, or maybe even out in interstellar space. ”

Via Futurismic: “Centauri Dreams pours water, or rather radiation, on the plausibility of panspermia.”

Origins of Panspermia Theory

This concept has drifted around the universe of space science since at least as long ago as 1864, when William Thomson Kelvin told the Royal Society of Edinburgh “The hypothesis that life originated on this earth through moss-grown fragments from the ruins of another world may seem wild and visionary; all I maintain is that it is not unscientific.” He repeated the assertion in 1871 at the 41st Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, using the less colorful term “seed-bearing meteoritic stones.”

In 1903, in the German journal Umschau, Svante Arrhenius removed the meteors from the equation. Instead, he wrote, individual spores wafted throughout space, colonizing any hospitable planet they lit on. Arrhenius named the theory panspermia.

Source: Space.com

Terrence McKenna on Panspermia

As I understand the Crick theory of panspermia, it’s a theory of how life spread through the universe. What I was suggesting … is that intelligence, not life, but intelligence may have come here in this spore-bearing life form. This is a more radical version of the panspermia theory of Crick and Ponampurama. In fact I think that theory will probably be vindicated. I think in a hundred years if people do biology they will think it quite silly that people once thought that spores could not be blown from one star system to another by cosmic radiation pressure.

Link: interview with Terrence McKenna, by David Jay Brown & Rebecca McClen, High Times Magazine, April 1992

Catching Space Dust: Aerogel

Although aerogel is classed as a solid, 99% of the substance is made up of gas, which gives it a cloudy appearance.

… In 1999 [NASA] fitted its Stardust space probe with a mitt packed full of aerogel to catch the dust from a comet’s tail. It returned with a rich collection of samples last year.

Link

The Andromeda Strain: I’m reminded of Michael Crichton’s novel, where the goal of Project Scoop was to collect micro-organisms from near-earth orbit for use as biological warfare agents. Scoop returned with an organism that used radiation as food.

Robert Wise directed the 1971 movie version. Film critic Ryan Harvey offers this assessment:

“The original 1969 novel established Michael Crichton as the new king of the airport bookstore thriller and set the stage for most of his novels since with its cold data-heavy style and minimal characterization. … The Andromeda Strain’s antiseptic approach to a scientific crisis remains potent and believable today. Wise’s cinematic version perfectly transfers the icy journalistic style of the book to the screen, even preserving Crichton’s pages worth of computer-printed documents.”
[Link]

Tardigrades: Itty Bitty Critters in Space? It’s possible that tardigrades could survive extended travel across space.

Tardigrades are small animals. The biggest adults may reach a body length of 1.5 mm, the smallest below 0.1 mm.

Tardigrades are one of the few groups of species that are capable of reversibly suspending their metabolism and going into a state of cryptobiosis. Several species regularly survive in a dehydrated state for nearly ten years …. Tardigrades have been known to withstand the following extremes while in this state:

* Temperature — tardigrades can survive being heated for a few minutes to 151°C or being chilled for days at -200°C, or for a few minutes at -272°C. (1° warmer than absolute zero).

* Radiation — as shown by Raul M. May from the University of Paris, tardigrades can withstand 5,700 grays or 570,000 rads of x-ray radiation. (Ten to twenty grays or 1000-2000 rads could be fatal to a human).

* Pressure — they can withstand the extremely low pressure of a vacuum and also very high pressures, many times greater than atmospheric pressure. It has recently been proven that they can survive in the vacuum of space. Recent research has notched up another feat of endurability; apparently they can withstand 6000 atmospheres pressure, which is nearly six times the pressure of water in the deepest ocean trench.

* Dehydration - tardigrades have been shown to survive nearly one decade in a dry state.[5]

Source: Wikipedia.

To do March 3: look up in night sky, see total lunar eclipse

Via Boing Boing.

A gem in one on Tutankhamun’s necklaces is “older than the earliest Egyptian civilisation”, and appears meteoric in origin, according to a recent report:

In 1996 in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Italian mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele spotted an unusual yellow-green gem in the middle of one of Tutankhamun’s necklaces.

The jewel was tested and found to be glass, but intriguingly it is older than the earliest Egyptian civilisation.

Working with Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat, they traced its origins to unexplained chunks of glass found scattered in the sand in a remote region of the Sahara Desert.

But the glass is itself a scientific enigma. How did it get to be there and who or what made it?

An Austrian astrochemist Christian Koeberl had established that the glass had been formed at a temperature so hot that there could be only one known cause: a meteorite impacting with Earth. And yet there were no signs of an impact crater, even in satellite images.

Mark Boslough, who specialises in modelling large impacts on supercomputers, created a simulation of a [meteoric airburst] …. The simulation revealed that an impactor could … generate a blistering atmospheric fireball, creating surface temperatures of 1,800C, and leaving behind a field of glass.

[BBC: Link]

Via Slashdot

Wikipedia: Tutankhamun

Image mashup, my sketch + the Pleiades.

Full-size image, 1600 x 1200 px.

Mir (Мир, which can mean both world and peace in Russian) was a highly successful Soviet (and later Russian) space station. It was humanity’s first consistently inhabited long-term research station in space. Through a number of collaborations, it was made internationally accessible to cosmonauts and astronauts of many different countries. Mir was assembled in orbit by successively connecting several modules, each launched separately from February 19, 1986 to 1996. The station existed until March 23, 2001, at which point it was deliberately de-orbited and broke apart during atmospheric re-entry. Link.

Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr[1] von Braun (March 23, 1912 – June 16, 1977) was one of the leading figures in the development of rocket technology in Germany and the United States. Originally a German scientist who led Germany’s rocket development program before and during World War II, he entered the United States at the end of the war through the then-secret Operation Paperclip. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen and worked on the American ICBM program before joining NASA, where he served as Director. He is generally regarded as the father of the United States space program. Link.