By DPA
Hamburg : The biblical admonition of all life going from “dust to dust” has taken a new twist with scientific findings that non-organic cosmic dust particles can in fact “come to life” under certain circumstances.
The new research, published in the New Journal of Physics, found non-organic dust, when held in the form of plasma in zero gravity, formed the helical structures found in DNA.
The particles are held together by electromagnetic forces that the scientists say could contain a code comparable to the genetic information held in organic matter.
It appeared that this code could be transferred to the next generation.
The phenomenon has far-reaching implications for definitions of alien life.
“This came as a bit of a surprise to us,” says Gregor Morfill of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany. He and his colleagues have built a computer simulation to model what happens to dust immersed in an ionised gas, or plasma.
The dust grains pick up a negative charge by absorbing electrons from the plasma and then this charged “nucleus” attracts positive ions, which form a shell around it.
It was already known that this system can produce regular arrays of dust called plasma crystals, and some experiments have also shown hints of spiral structures.
Now, Morfill’s simulation suggests that the dust should sometimes form double helixes.
Like DNA, the dust spirals can store information. They do so in the scaffolding of their bodies, as they have two stable states – one with a large diameter and the other with a small one – so a spiral could carry a series of wide and narrow sections.
“Going by our current narrow definitions of what life is, it qualifies,” Morfill says.
“The question now is to see if it can evolve to become intelligent. It’s a little bit like science fiction at the moment. The potential level of complexity we are looking at is of an amoeba or a plant.
“I do not believe that the systems we are talking about are life as we know it. We need to define the criteria for what we think of as life much more clearly.”
The experiments were conducted in zero gravity conditions in Germany and on the International Space Station, over 321 km above earth.
The findings have provoked speculation that the helix could be a common structure that underpins all life, organic and non-organic.
The team is now setting up an experiment to find out whether real dust spirals exist. It’s tricky because gravity will tend to disrupt the delicate dust structure but they can get around that to some extent by compressing the dusty plasma, increasing electrical forces within it.
To go much further, they will have to find another way to counteract gravity – perhaps by using magnetic fields or by putting their experiment in free-fall on the International Space Station.
Alive or not, these dust structures could exist in nature. There are many places in space where small grains of material are immersed in plasma.
“In our solar system, the places most likely to have the right conditions are planetary rings, especially the rings of Saturn and Uranus,” says Morfill. There the “dust” would actually be fine ice grains, and the nourishing plasma would be supplied by the solar wind, channelled by planetary magnetic fields.