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Modelling Panspermia in the TRAPPIST-1 System

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Modelling Panspermia in the TRAPPIST-1 System October 13, 2017 Modelling panspermia in the TRAPPIST-1 system James A. Blake1,2*, David J. Armstrong1,2, Dimitri Veras1,2 Abstract The recent ground-breaking discovery of seven temperate planets within the TRAPPIST-1 system has been hailed as a milestone in the development of exoplanetary science. Centred on an ultra-cool dwarf star, the planets all orbit within a sixth of the distance from Mercury to the Sun. This remarkably compact nature makes the system an ideal testbed for the modelling of rapid lithopanspermia, the idea that micro-organisms can be distributed throughout the Universe via fragments of rock ejected during a meteoric impact event. We perform N-body simulations to investigate the timescale and success-rate of lithopanspermia within TRAPPIST-1. In each simulation, test particles are ejected from one of the three planets thought to lie within the so-called ‘habitable zone’ of the star into a range of allowed orbits, constrained by the ejection velocity and coplanarity of the case in question. The irradiance received by the test particles is tracked throughout the simulation, allowing the overall radiant exposure to be calculated for each one at the close of its journey. A simultaneous in-depth review of space microbiological literature has enabled inferences to be made regarding the potential survivability of lithopanspermia in compact exoplanetary systems. 1Department of Physics, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL 2Centre for Exoplanets and Habitability, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL *Corresponding author: [email protected] Contents Universe, and can propagate from one location to another. This interpretation owes itself predominantly to the works of William 1 Introduction1 Thompson (Lord Kelvin) and Hermann von Helmholtz in the 1.1 Mechanisms for panspermia...............2 latter half of the 19th Century. Indeed, Thompson provided an Radiopanspermia • Lithopanspermia • Directed panspermia • excellent summation of the theory in 1871 [1]: Pseudopanspermia • Other mechanisms 1.2 Micro-organisms in low Earth orbit..........3 “We must regard it as probable in the highest de- Early missions • Spacelab • LDEF • EURECA • MIR-Perseus • gree that there are countless seed-bearing mete- Biopan • EXPOSE • Cosmic rays oric stones moving about through space. If at the 1.3 Micro-organisms in simulation experiments....9 present instance no life existed upon this Earth, Planetary ejection • Atmospheric entry one such stone falling upon it might, by what we 1.4 The TRAPPIST-1 system................. 13 blindly call natural causes, lead to its becoming Discovery • Habitability • Motivation covered with vegetation.” 2 Theory 16 With these premises in place, panspermia has since been cham- 2.1 Equations of orbits...................... 16 pioned by a number of prominent scientists, with notable con- General orbits • Circular orbits tributions from Svante Arrhenius [2], Francis Crick [3], Fred 2.2 Impacting the target..................... 18 Hoyle [4] and Chandra Wickramasinghe [4, 5, 6]. Naturally, 3 Simulation set-up 19 this level of support for the theory has ensured that numerous 3.1 Simulation script....................... 19 branches of thought have developed over the years, to be dis- cussed further in Sec. 1.1. Panspermia would, however, remain 3.2 Additional scripts....................... 20 conjecture until the 1980s, a decade which welcomed the ability 4 Results and Discussion 21 to meticulously test the theory by exposing micro-organisms to 4.1 Timescale and fate...................... 21 low Earth orbit environments. Such experiments, both pioneer- 4.2 Radiant exposure and survivability.......... 22 ing and present-day, will receive attention in Sec. 1.2. 4.3 Discussion............................ 26 A particular surge of interest came in the 1990s as a result of the Martian meteorite, ALH84001, which was found to pos- 5 Further work 27 sess structures that could indicate the presence of terrestrial Acknowledgments 28 nanobacteria. Careful testing of ALH84001, shown in Fig.1, References 28 has alluded to the presence of amino acids and polycyclic aro- matic hydrocarbons [7]. Whilst these can be an indication of life, most experts agreed that the compounds most likely formed 1. Introduction abiotically from organic molecules, or via contamination during The concept of panspermia (‘seeds everywhere’) has existed extraction. The past year has sparked a similar rise of interest since the ancient writings of the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras in panspermia, due to the discovery of seven Earth-sized plan- (500 BC–428 BC), although his notion differs from that of the ets in TRAPPIST-1, a system whose compact nature provides current theory. In modern nomenclature, panspermia refers to an unprecedented testbed for the process. This constitutes the the hypothesis stating that seeds of life exist across the entire motivation for our study. Modelling panspermia in the TRAPPIST-1 system — 2/32 of lithopanspermia as a mechanism remains speculative, cer- tain aspects have recently become testable experimentally [15]. An outline of these experiments is provided in Sec. 1.3. The presence of Martian meteorites on Earth provides evidence of the natural transfer of rock between planets within the Solar System. This was anticipated in the mid–late 1800s by the likes of Hermann von Helmholtz and Lord Kelvin, both of whom favoured the lithopanspermia hypothesis [1, 16]. For lithopanspermia to take place, one would expect the process to consist of three separate stages: 1. Planetary ejection – it was Cockell who first realised that in order for life to be transported from one planet to another, it must first be able to survive ejection from the original planet [17]. Such an ejection would result from the impacts of km–sized asteroids and comets, subjecting the rock to extreme forces, accelerations and tempera- Figure 1. The ALH84001 Martian meteorite is ∼9 cm across ture increases. A combination of petrographic studies and has been found to contain organic carbon compounds. and numerical simulations of Martian rocks, ejected at a velocity high enough to allow escape from Mars, have unearthed shock pressure estimates of 5–55 GPa during 1.1 Mechanisms for panspermia launch, alongside post-shock temperatures in the range Whilst we have so far referred solely to the general theory of 100–600 ◦C[18, 19]. Sec. 1.3 will provide further de- panspermia, numerous branches have developed over the last tails of these experiments, alongside others investigating couple of centuries, each proposing a separate mechanism for the effect of hypervelocity impact on the wellbeing of the transfer of life throughout the Universe. Although there micro-organisms. Whilst these impacts are undoubtedly exists no conflict between the various mechanisms, and they energetic in nature, a small proportion of the resulting could all be at work in relative harmony, it is important to ejecta will not exceed the lower limit of 100 ◦C. These distinguish between them. lower temperatures result from an ejection originating in the ‘spall’ zone, referring to the targetted surface of the 1.1.1 Radiopanspermia impacted planet. Here, the shock wave from the impact Proposed originally by Arrhenius in his 1903 work, The Distri- is effectively cancelled by the reflected shock wave from bution of Life in Space, radiopanspermia is the hypothesis that the surface [20]. It has been estimated that more than a micro-organisms can propagate through space, driven by stellar billion fragments of rock have been ejected from Mars at radiation pressure alone [8]. His assertions were driven by the such low temperatures throughout the history of the Solar knowledge that interplanetary space within our Solar System is System, with ∼5 % having the potential to land on Earth. littered with micron-sized dust particles. Such particles, below What’s more, the Earth’s crust has been found to be inhab- a critical size of 1.5 microns, would be driven away by the ited by a number of micro-organisms [21, 22]. To many, radiation pressure of the sun, potentially transporting microbial these findings have strongly supported the lithopansper- stowaways to other planetary systems. mia hypothesis. An intriguing theory, though one which quickly loses ef- 2. Transit in space – if the microbial life is able to survive fectiveness as the size of the particle increases. In this sense, the ejection process, it must then withstand the inter- radiopanspermia as a mechanism for transporting life holds planetary transfer that follows. The scale of this journey solely for very small particles, at most hosting single bacterial will depend on the system in question, and whether the spores [9]. Furthermore, Shklovskij and Sagan asserted that it lithopanspermia is occuring between planets of the same is extremely unlikely that micro-organisms would be able to system, or an entirely separate system. One specific case withstand the ‘lethal’ concoction of the solar UV and cosmic that has been studied in great detail is exchange of ejecta radiation, whilst more recent studies have highlighted the dele- between Mars and the Earth [9, 14, 23]. Here, estimates terious nature of the space vacuum [10, 11, 12]. Experiments of journey times lie within the range of 1–20 million looking into the effect of radiation on DNA stability have pro- years, although simulations appear to suggest that a small vided a final nail in the coffin for radiopanspermia, concluding proportion of meteorites could reach Earth within the first that boulder-sized rocks (∼1 m in diameter) are required to few years of travel [23]. This is the primary reason why provide effective shielding of bacterial spores from galactic the seven recently discovered planets of the TRAPPIST-1 cosmic radiation [13, 14]. These findings instead support a system (see Sec. 1.4) have generated such excitement mechanism involving much larger transportation vessels, such within the fields of panspermia and astrobiology. The as asteroids and comets, known as lithopanspermia. planets of this system all lie within a radius of ∼5 % of the Earth-Sun distance.
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