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An artist's rendering showsPhilaeon the comet's surface.

Philae's comet may host alien 'life', say astronomers

AFP

Astronomers have proposed a novel explanation for the strange appearance of the comet carrying Europe's robot probe through outer space: alien microscopic life.

Many of the frozen dust ball's features, which include a black crust over lakes of ice, flat-bottomed craters and mega-boulders scattered on the surface, were "consistent" with the presence of microbes, they said.

Observations by the European Space Agency's comet orbiter have shown that 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko "is not to be seen as a deep-frozen inactive body, but supports geological processes", Max Wallis of the University of Cardiff said in a statement issued by the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS).

In fact, the comet racing towards the Sun at a speed of 32.9 kilometres per second "could be more hospitable to micro-life than our Arctic and Antarctic regions".

Wallis and his colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology presented their theory on Monday to a meeting of the RAS in Llandudno, Wales.

They pointed to 's detection of complex organic material, which gave the comet its surprisingly super-dark and low-reflecting surface, as "evidence for life".

Furthermore, Wickramasinghe said that 67P's gas ejections started "at distances from the Sun too far away to trigger surface sublimation".

This implied that micro-organisms under the comet's surface had been "building pockets of high pressure gases that crack overlying ice and vent organic particles", he said by email.

Wickramasinghe also cited a rugged surface with evidence of re-sealed cracks and displaced boulders, and a covering of organics which "need to be resupplied".

The observed features "are all consistent with a mixture of ice and organic material that consolidate under the Sun's warming during the comet's orbiting in space, when active micro-organisms can be supported", said the statement.

Micro-organisms could use liquid water to colonise the comet - infiltrating cracks in the ice and "snow" during warmer periods when the cosmic wanderer is nearer the Sun, the duo said.

"Organisms containing anti-freeze salts are particularly good at adapting to these conditions and some could be active at temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees Celsius."

Sunlit areas of the comet already approached this temperature last September, when it was about 500 million kilometres from the Sun, and emitting weak jets of gas.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Philae's comet could host microscopic alien 'life'
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