Possible transfer of life by earth-grazing objects to exoplanetary systems

Abstract

Recently, a 30-cm object was discovered to graze the Earth’s atmosphere and shift into a Jupiter-crossing orbit. We use the related survey parameters to calibrate the total number of such objects. The number of objects that could have exported terrestrial microbes out of the Solar System is in the range 2 × 109–3 × 1011. We find that 107–109 such objects could have been captured by binary star systems over the lifetime of the Solar System. Adopting the fiducial assumption that one polyextremophile colony is picked up by each object, the total number of objects carrying living colonies on them upon capture could be 10–103.