Some 65 million years ago the greatest asteroid impact in a billion years may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth. Blasted debris escaped Earth’s gravitational force forming irregular orbits around the sun, eventually finding its way to the planets and moons of the solar system.
“Using the pulsars we observe across the Milky Way galaxy, we are trying to be like a spider sitting in stillness in the middle of her web,” says Vanderbilt’s Stephen Taylor, assistant professor of physics and astronomy and former astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) about the location of absolute stillness in our solar system, the center of gravity with which to measure the gravitational waves that signal the existence of the invisible paradoxes we call black holes, which have no memory, and contain the earliest memories of the universe.
Recent research has revealed that Venus might have looked like Earth for three billion years, with vast oceans that could have been friendly to life. “That’s what sets my imagination on fire,” says Darby Dyar, a planetary scientist at Mount Holyoke College with NASA’s Solar System Exploration team, which led her to surmise: “If that’s the case, there was plenty of time for evolution to kick into action,” and conclude that Venus may have been the first habitable planet in the Solar System — “a place where life was just as likely to arise as it was on Earth.”
“It’s increasingly seeming that the solar system is something of an oddball,” said Gregory Laughlin, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “While it’s still too soon to know for sure how odd the solar system is, if it turns out to be a cosmological anomaly, then so might be Earth – and life.”
When we consider the origins of life in our Solar System, a remarkable discovery has to be taken into account –the Solar System is substantially over-abundant in metals compared with average interstellar abundances at the time of its formation 4.6 billion years ago. These solar abundances are similar to present interstellar abundances, an anomaly that remains a mystery. One possibility scientists suggest is that the Sun formed much closer to the galactic center than its current position, which may have resulted in a plentiful supply of raw materials in the solar nebula from which to form the Earth and its biosphere.
“They are stained glass windows to the earliest time period of the solar system,” says Harold Connolly, a cosmochemist with Rowan University in New Jersey, about the enigmatic origins of ancient chondrules delivered to Earth by Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission. “They are witnesses to processes that operated in the early solar system. The question is, what did they witness?”
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