We’re well aware of the inexorable damage that asteroids can cause Earth if they ever hit us. However, not many are aware that these asteroids have also played a major role in shaping up the evolution of human life on Earth. In fact, many theories even believe that asteroids brought the first-ever primordial life to Earth. And now a group of researchers have found out that there are as many as about 10 trillion asteroid-sized objects in space that carry life. They’ve also been able to carry out the most comprehensive calculation of panspermia that occurs in the Milky Way.

According to the space theory of Panspermia, life exists all across the universe, and gets distributed by the space bodies (comets, asteroids, dust, et al) that carry along with them unknown and unintended presence of microorganisms wherever they go. As per Idan Ginsburg, researcher at Harvard University, Panspermia takes place way more times in space than you’d imagine.

“We are not the first to have discussed this, but we are the first to really look into this at such a level of detail. Other researchers have mentioned the possibility of galactic panspermia, but when we did the calculations we got these very large values. That suggests that this is not only possible, it’s probable”, mentioned Ginsburg. The study done by Ginsburg and team also suggest that there might even be about 100 million objects the size of Saturn’s moon Enceladus and 1,000 Earth-sized objects that carry life or prebiotic material.

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Now to understand what goes behind the whole process of panspermia, researchers focused mainly on the center of the galaxy. This is because it’s at the center of the galaxy where things are “dynamic” as it consists of a variety of planetary objects including planets, comets, etc. At the galaxy center also lies a massive black hole that persistently takes objects in and out. “With a black hole you can easily accelerate things anywhere from 1,000 to over 10,000 kilometers-per-second,” said Ginsburg.

The experiment involved careful analysis of several factors associated with the object using an extensive mathematical approach. Researchers state that they want to further explore the study more in the future and see if they can ever observe the whole process in action.