Life?

[Lunar4]

Could extraterrestrial life be made of corkscrew-shaped particles of interstellar dust? Intriguing new evidence of life-like structures that form from inorganic substances in space are revealed today in the New Journal of Physics.

Now, an international team has discovered that under the right conditions, particles 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.

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".

He adds that the plasma conditions needed to form these helical structures are common in outer space. However, plasmas can also form under more down to earth conditions such as the point of a lightning strike. The researchers hint that perhaps an inorganic form of life emerged on the primordial earth, which then acted as the template for the more familiar organic molecules we know today.

http://www.physorg.com/news105869123.html

[Juvenal]

It is good to see that there is nothing new under the Sun.

The idea that life originated in interstellar gas clouds was first proposed by Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe. Hoyle was unhappy with the chemical evolution theory of the origin of life on earth because he didn't believe that there had been enough time for the required synthesis of self-replicating molecules to have occurred.

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe developed the theory of Panspermia - proposing that life originated in gas-clouds (thus allowing 10 billion years for the process instead of just 1 billion on earth). Hoyle proposed that the earth has been seeded with life from cometary impacts, and that subsequent additional impacts have been a major driver for evolution.

Hoyle was something of a pariah due to his defeat in the Big Bang vs Steady State controversey. Interesting it was Hoyle himself who originated the term "Big Bang" as a term of scorn on the theory.

Hoyle is a fascinating character and an important figure in the field of cosmology. It was Hoyle who in 1946 demonstrated that all elements in the universe heavier than Helium have been created by nucleosynthesis as fusion products within stellar cores.