Robot probe comet might have life on

Paris – Astronomers have put forward an explanation for the strange appearance of the comet which is carrying Europe’s robot probe Philae through outer space – namely alien microscopic life.

Many of the frozen dust ball’s features were “consistent” with the presence of microbes, they said.

“Observations by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta comet orbiter, has shown that 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko supports geological processes,” Max Wallis of the University of Cardiff said in a statement issued by the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS).

In fact, the comet racing towards the Sun at a speed of 32.9km/s “could be more hospitable to micro-life than our Arctic and Antarctic regions”.

Wallis and his colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology, presented their theory to a meeting of the RAS in Llandudno, Wales, yesterday.

They pointed to Rosetta’s detection of complex organic material giving the comet its surprisingly super-dark and low-reflecting surface, as “evidence for life”.

Wickramasinghe said 67P’s gas ejections started “at distances from the Sun too far away to trigger surface sublimation”.

This implied that micro-organisms under the comet’s surface had been “building pockets of high pressure gases that crack overlying ice and vent organic particles”, he said by e-mail.

Observed features “are all consistent with a mixture of ice and organic material that consolidate under the Sun’s warming during the comet’s orbiting in space, when active micro-organisms can be supported”, said the statement.

Micro-organisms could use liquid water to colonise the comet – infi ltrating cracks in the ice and “snow” during warmer periods when the cosmic wanderer is nearer to the Sun, the duo said.

“Organisms containing antisalts are particularly good at adapting to these conditions and some could be active at temperatures as low as -400°C.”

Sunlit areas of the comet already approached this temperature last September, when it was about 500 million km from the Sun, and emitting weak jets of gas.

Comets follow elliptical orbits around the Sun, and warm as they draw closer, causing a process of solid-to-gas transformation called sublimation, which is what gives them their spectacular tails.

– AFP

Comet might be more hospitable to micro-life than our own polar regions