Experimental Blog #126

Notes and Quotations from "Faint Echoes, Distant Stars - The Science and Politics of Finding Life beyond Earth" by Ben Bova

"Clouds of water vapor have been found deep in interstellar space"... "Water is the most common triatomic {three-atom} molecule in the universe."

In November of 1969 American astronauts retrieved a camera from the Surveyor 3 probe that had reached the Moon in 1967. NASA scientists "were stunned" to find the bacteriun Streptococcus mitus still alive after "thirty-one months on the Moon without air or water, subjected to hard radiation and temperatures that varied from" plus 132 degrees C to minus 151 degrees C.

"There are all sorts of microbes{called extremophiles here on Earth} living in environments that had previously been thought to be too hot, too cold, too acidic, too salty for life to exist."

"Comets are actually kilometers-wide icebergs laced with carbon-rich dust."

"To date{probably early 2003}, more that a hundred molecular species{including complex prebiotic molecules} have been detected in interstellar space."

"In 1994, Jupiter was struck by twenty-one fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 ... Blasting into Jupiter's atmosphere at an estimated 200,000 kilometers per hour ... with the energy of a million hydrogen bombs."

It has been postulated that in the Oort Cloud far beyond the orbit of Pluto there are trillions of comets. The Oort Cloud might extend half way to the nearest neighbor star Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light-years. "Perhaps some of the comets that we have seen in our skies actually originated around our stellar neighbor."