Interstellar 'slowball' could have carried seeds of life
Previous studies into whether material could travel between solar systems predicted that such an exchange would be unlikely, because the speed matter would need to be travelling at to escape one star would mean it was moving too fast to be caught by another. Now Edward Belbruno and colleagues at Princeton University have shown that planetary systems in young, densely packed star clusters could throw out rocks at a slower pace. They showed that for rocks in certain orbital positions, the gravitational pull of the central star is equal to the pull of other stars in the cluster. This sends the rocks into chaotic orbits that eventually allow them to wander off at about 0.1 kilometres per second - slow enough for other stars to catch them. Link
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]
