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The carbon atoms in earthly life forms such as humans may have travelled 400,000 light years into intergalactic space, and back, before taking up residence in living things.
So says a new study of a conveyor belt of basic elements called the circumgalactic medium, undertaken by scientists at the University of Washington using the Hubble space telescope.
The circumgalactic medium is a solution to the problem of how organic chemistry came to Earth given that anything more complex than hydrogen and helium has to be “forged in stellar furnaces and later flung into the cosmos,” as Science Daily puts it.
The study used the Hubble’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph to confirm the existence of “giant reservoirs” of oxygen as well as carbon in the medium. Genuine question: what does this mean for the chances of life elsewhere?
