Interstellar Meteor

[bison]

There appears to be sound evidence that a meteor, which burned up in the atmosphere above Papua New Guinea in 2014, may have  come from another star system. It's unusual nature escaped notice, at that time. However, in examining old records of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, Dr. Avi Loeb noticed that the object was on a hyperbolic orbit. It was traveling too fast to be gravitationally bound to the Sun, about 37 miles per second.

Please find a link to an article with further information, below:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/04/interstellar-meteor-may-have-hit-earth-fireball-oumuamua-avi-loeb/

  

Edited April 16, 2019 by bison

[+Not A Rockstar]

@bison you seem to be up on Space research and thought. I have heard that some say it is possible that early life (I assume extremely primitive) may have been spread around by meteors and such striking or blowing up in atmospheres of alien (to the source of the meteor) worlds and always thought that basically science fiction novel material. Maybe if it was a massive one that landed on surface intact with something in its core protected from all the travel and time and heat and....

I find it hard to believe even so. What do you think about this notion? I think it is far more reasonable to suppose that if, for example, we find microbes on Mars, that they came up there naturally, unless we contaminated it with our own microbes somehow.

Thanks.

Edited April 17, 2019 by Not A Rockstar
typo

[+and-then]

20 minutes ago, Not A Rockstar said:

@bison you seem to be up on Space research and thought. I have heard that some say it is possible that early life (I assume extremely primitive) may have been spread around by meteors and such striking or blowing up in atmospheres of alien (to the source of the meteor) worlds and always thought that basically science fiction novel material. Maybe if it was a massive one that landed on surface intact with something in its core protected from all the travel and time and heat and....

I find it hard to believe even so. What do you think about this notion? I think it is far more reasonable to suppose that if, for example, we find microbes on Mars, that they came up there naturally, unless we contaminated it with our own microbes somehow.

Thanks.

I agree.  Anything hardy enough to survive on the surface of an incoming meteor, we don't need here    

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

[+Not A Rockstar]

2 minutes ago, and then said:

I agree.  Anything hardy enough to survive on the surface of an incoming meteor, we don't need here   

Seriously. I mean this meteor being talked about was travelling forever before ending here. If something survived on that, that is just scary LOL. I used to think "eh, maybe" but, the more I learn the less I think it very likely, but, I am no expert.

[bison]

Meteorites striking one planet containing life, and sending debris to another world, transferring that life to the second planet is speculative, as yet. We need to find life on another planet before we can test this. If you read the wikipedia article that and then linked to, you'll see that this is considered entirely possible for some kinds of simple organisms, imbedded inside a meteorite. This is called 'lithopanspermia' , which is the title of one section of the linked article.

If we ever find life on Mars, it will probably be possible to discern if it arose there independently, or came from Earth. Important differences from Earthly life would be almost certainly seen in the first case. Numerous significant points of similarity could be expected in the latter.

Supposing that primordial Mars, being a smaller world, cooled more quickly than did Earth, it just might have had life before Earth. Speculatively, life on Earth could have been seeded from Mars.   

[+Not A Rockstar]

Yes I have read about it just found it hard to really believe. 

But, I suppose there could be extreme things which might survive such a transfer. 

Still, in many ways, Space seems very efficient at maintaining quarantine among worlds given the extremes off world for life as we know it, to me. 

It would be rather ironic, though, if in the end we found out we came from Mars after all  

[Jon the frog]

Complex life forms can survive reentry if they have some kind of shielding like we have seen during the Columbia crash. But cosmic radiation in far outer space is far more deadly...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2992123.stm

 

Edited April 17, 2019 by Jon the frog