Interplanetary Dust Particles May Seed Terrestrial Planets with Organics

Interplanetary dust comes from comets, asteroids and leftover debris from the birth of the solar system. The dust particles rain down on Earth as well as other Solar System bodies. Now, researchers from the University of Hawaii-Manoa (UHM) recently discovered that these particles could be delivering water and organics to other planets.

However, the "delivering" of the water and organics isn't as simple as it sounds. As the particles travel through space they encounter solar wind, which is a stream of charged particles, predominantly hydrogen ions. When the ions collide with the dust particles, the atoms are knocked out of order and leave behind oxygen that is readily available to react with hydrogen. This is where the creation of water molecules may occur.

"It is a thrilling possibility that this influx of dust has acted as a continuous rainfall of little reaction vessels containing both the water and organics needed for the eventual origin of life on Earth and possibly Mars," said Hope Ishii, new Associate Researcher at UHM and co-author of the study, documented in this ScienceDaily article.

What's also thrilling is that these particles could do the same for exoplanets; worlds that orbit other stars. This means that the charged reactions as well as delivery of water and organic molecules could happen in almost any other planetary system. This "solar wind irradiation" may also potentially explain the source of water ice located on permanently shadowed regions of the moon.

These interplanetary dust particles can help unearth new findings in space, particularly possible life form located in some other parts of the solar system.

Although this recent work does not suggest how much water has been delivered to Earth by these IDPs, the scientists at UHM School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and University of California-Berkeley aim to estimate such water abundances in future work.