Microbes can survive and grow in 100% hydrogen atmospheres, suggesting life could potentially evolve on a much broader range of alien worlds than is often considered, a new study has found. Via InsideScience.
May 29, 2012: President Obama bestows the award to John Glenn.Microbes can survive and grow in 100% hydrogen atmospheres, suggesting life could potentially evolve on a much broader range of alien worlds than is often considered, a new study has found.
Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. While astronomers have not yet detected any rocky exoplanets with hydrogen atmospheres, they expect such atmospheres to exist, especially around exoplanets known as super-Earths, which have more mass and therefore stronger gravitational pulls than Earth does.
However, astronomers"typically do not think of hydrogen-dominated planet atmospheres as conducive to life," said study lead author Sara Seager, a planetary scientist at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There was little previous research on how well life could grow in hydrogen-rich atmospheres, save for microorganisms known to depend on hydrogen gas to survive.
Their growth rates were slower in hydrogen atmospheres, perhaps due to the lack of energy the microbes would normally get from oxygen. E. coli reached numbers roughly half those they would have in regular air, and yeast was hundreds of times less abundant than it would otherwise have been.The researchers noted that although E. coli is a relatively simple microbe, it could generate 45 different gases such as ammonia and nitrous oxide.
"Astronomers should keep an open mind as to which planets are worth searching for life," Seager said.
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