You wouldn't bet on many things surviving a direct hit from a massive asteroid. Yet a few hardy microbes have been shown to live through a simulated smash, boosting the theory that life on Earth could have been seeded from another planet.
Large asteroids or comets that collide with rocky planets like Mars blast fragments into space, and some researchers reckon that this may feed a cosmic conveyor belt of life, in which streams of alien microbes travel from planet to planet inside meteoroids. However, no one had tested whether organisms could survive the extreme temperatures and pressures of the initial collision.
Jörg Fritz of Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, and colleagues picked three organisms that live in extreme habitats on Earth such as deserts, high mountains and polar regions: spores of Bacillus subtilis, Chroococcidiopsis bacteria, and the lichen Xanthoria elegans.
The team placed each of them in a "rock-organism ...
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