If alien life is out there, it may be able to exploit more-extreme environments than scientists think, because huge gravitational forces don't seem to pose much of a problem for microbes.
Several different species of bacteria can survive and reproduce in "hypergravity" more than 400,000 times stronger than that of the Earth, a new study reports. The find suggests that alien life could take root in a wide range of conditions -- and that it could survive the high G-forces imposed by meteorite impacts and ejections, making the exchange of life between planets a distinct possibility. "The number and types of environments that we now think life can inhabit in the universe has expanded. The results also suggest that the transport of viable lifeforms between worlds is a real possibility, researchers said.
Over the ages, Earth has been showered with perhaps 1 billion tons of Mars rocks, which were liberated from the Red Planet via meteorite strikes. Such interplanetary exchanges, in our solar system or others, could theoretically transfer microbes as well -- an aspect of the "panspermia" hypothesis, which posits that the seeds of life are everywhere and hopscotch from world to world. Space.com
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