MICROBES from Earth could have journeyed to Saturn's moon Titan and may even be thriving there. This startling suggestion comes from a massive computer simulation of what could happen to Earth rocks blasted into space by a large meteor impact.
An impact of the type that caused the mass extinction of species at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary could eject more than half a billion rocks from Earth into space. Our planet has had quite a few impacts of at least this magnitude in its four-billion-year history, says Brett Gladman of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "We know that meteorites can escape the gravity well of large planets," he says, pointing to the meteorites from Mars that have been found on Earth.
Gladman's simulation looked at where such rocks might go after they left Earth. Earlier models had examined the probability of Earth rocks reaching Mars, but he wanted ...
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