Earth could 'send' life to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn - elEconomista.es

Europa Press | 10/12/2013 – 18:45

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detached Rocks Earth may have brought life to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, according to a study published in ‘Astrobiology’, conducted by an international team of scientists. This research is intended to alert the experts that if those moons have life must contemplate question of life from other planets and not sources originating in the world itself.

The idea that life can be propagated through space is known as panspermia. A class of panspermia is lithopanspermia, one that determines that life can go on the rocks emerging from the worlds surface. If these meteorites carry enough bodies they could plant living on another planet or moon.

While it might seem far-fetched, some studies suggest that lithopanspermia possible. For example, more than 100 meteorites from Mars have been discovered on Earth. They are rocks that were removed from the red planet and ended up crashing into his neighbor planet.

To conduct this research, scientists have performed computer simulations. This practice showed that no matter which left Earth by cosmic impacts and may have escaped the gravitational pull of the planet, landing on the moon. It has also been determined that billions of years of Earth dust may have accumulated on the lunar surface some 22 tons of earth material in 100 square miles.

200 million left the meteorite Earth

After obtaining these results, scientists extended the investigation to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn’s moons, some of which are being considered as potential carriers of life, the presence of ice on them.

Thus, lead author Rachel Worth, stressed that, “during work, the simulation has been performed more than 100,000 individual fragments” detached from Earth and Mars. Most of these meteorites crashed back on his home planet, others were swallowed by the sun, while another part ended up hitting planets into the inner solar system (Venus and Mercury). However, there was also a small fraction of meteorites hit the farthest planets into the star planets.

Researchers estimate that during 3500 million years is known that Earth has life been ‘produced’ some 200 million meteoroids large enough to bring life to the space. Also estimated that 800 million of these rocks they were ejected from Mars during the same period. This difference in figures is due to the lower gravity that has the red planet with respect to the Earth.

Of these, it is estimated that 83,000 meteorites on Earth and Mars could have 32,000 hit Jupiter after traveling 10 million years or less. In addition, approximately 14,000 Earth rocks should have hit Saturn, like 20,000 of Mars.

Since

moons of these giant worlds are relatively close to their planets, many of the impacts could “splash” satellites , as the author pointed out. They have calculated that Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus, and Jupiter’s moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, have been between one and 10 impacts, both Earth and Mars.

“These findings suggest the possibility of transfer of life from the inner solar system to the outer moons, although very rare, currently can not be excluded,” said Worth.

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