Dear friends,
In July a NASA spacecraft flew past a comet. It purposely sent a deep impact probe into the comet and the stuff that was ejected collected by the spacecraft and has been analyzed. What do you suppose was found in that plume ejected from the comet?
It was a large amount of the stuff of life! A surprisingly high amount of organic molecules were in the fine dust particles and water sprayed into space. That
means we may have found the origins of you and me, and all other life in the universe, in the dust that formed the comet, a remnant of long vanished worlds.
This experiment bolstered theories that comets may have seeded Earth with the raw materials for life and suggest they may be sponge-like ?rather than hardened
?at their cores. Scientists reported that probably all the way in, ice is all
in the form of tiny grains.
"It抯 like a sponge, with a lot of cavities," agrees Horst Uwe Keller, an astronomer at the Max-Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany. He observed the event with Europe's Rosetta spacecraft and says the discovery confirms previous observations suggesting other comets are also porous. "When you touch it,
it just crumbles under your hands."
This supports theories that comets may have brought water and the building blocks of life to Earth, and of course, that means to any other new planet ready to support life, too. The team hopes to eventually "identify all the species comets
brought in abundance to early Earth."
Comets are known to occasionally let loose streams of gas and dust. They have often been seen coming off of comets and astronomers watching the Tempel 1 comet,
the one that was probed, noticed that both before and after the impact it released the streams relatively often. in spurts of activity apparently triggered by sunlight. A scientist said that "probably comets undergo outbursts like this very frequently and the fact that everyone was looking intensively at this comet for an extended period allowed us to see phenomena that are probably common and weren抰 seen before."
A ready planet and the presense of sunlight to make the comet eject the stuff of
life; the sunlight to cause it to be nurtured. What an interesting discovery!
Don't you think it's fascinating! I already had read a book about it, but this
recent and solid finding adds even more weight to what was a theory, and now seems to be becoming a fact.
Exciting, eh?
Mary
