Solid grains ejected from terrestrial exoplanets as a probe of the abundance of life in the Milky Way

Abstract

Searching for extrasolar biosignatures is important to understand life on Earth and its origin. Astronomical observations of exoplanets may find such signatures, but it is difficult and may be impossible to claim unambiguous detection of life by remote sensing of exoplanet atmospheres. Here, another approach is considered: collecting grains ejected by asteroid impacts from exoplanets in the Milky Way and then traveling to the Solar System. The optimal grain size for this purpose is around 1 $\mu$m, and though uncertainty is large, about $10^5$ such grains are expected to be accreting on Earth every year, which may contain biosignatures of life that existed on their home planets. These grains may be collected by detectors placed in space, or extracted from Antarctic ice or deep-sea sediments, depending on future technological developments.

5 pages, no figure. Accepted for publication in International Journal of Astrobiology

References in corpus (10)

• Destruction of Interstellar Dust in Evolving Supernova Remnant Shock Waves
• The dust budget crisis in high-redshift submillimetre galaxies
• Advances in exoplanet science from Kepler
• Natural Transfer of Viable Microbes in Space from Planets in the Extra-Solar Systems to a Planet in our Solar System and Vice-Versa
• Is the dust-to-gas ratio constant in molecular clouds?
• Quantifying radial migration in the Milky Way: Inefficient over short timescales but essential to the very outer disc beyond ~15 kpc
• Supernovae within Pre-existing Wind-Blown Bubbles: Dust Injection vs. Ambient Dust Destruction
• Transfer of Rocks between Planetary Systems: Panspermia Revisited
• Emergence of life in an inflationary universe
• Late-time cosmic evolution of dust: solving the puzzle