Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2019

JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2019 In this paper, a small team of researchers led by Dimitri Veras (University of Warwick, Coventry) proposes the unification and extension to other planetary systems of panspermia models based on our Solar Sys- tem. Here is how Veras commented on this: “Equations regarding the physics of impact have already been established and used for Solar System applications, so we converted those for use in a general extra-solar sys- tem.” “Usually, the dynamics of panspermia is studied with numerical simulations, how- ever, these can be slow to run and must be tailored to an individual system.” “Alterna- tively, analytics are much faster to use and are general enough to be applicable to a wide variety of systems.” And analytics are certainly applicable to the TRAPPIST-1 system, for which it would be possible to calculate with approximation the likelihood life has been shared among sev- eral planets given assumptions about certain physical and chemical properties of each planet, information that is currently out of our reach. At the moment, the equations produced by Veras’ team are just a tool that I maginative rep- resentation of a glimpse of the sur- face of a habitable TRAPPIST-1 planet. In an environment of this kind, any elementary form of life from a nearby planet could easily prolif- erate. [NASA] On the side, the astrophysicist Dim- itri Veras, first au- thor of a recent work on pansper- mia in extrasolar systems. [Univer- sity of Warwick, Coventry]