New study finds thousands of alien asteroids could bring extraterrestrial life to Earth

When it comes to the potential that aliens might land on Earth, an invasion often comes to mind. Science fiction also has a place for the accidental infestation that might occur when an alien craft or asteroid crashes, though, and a new paper suggests the likelihood of this happening belongs firmly in the realm of reality.

Authors of this study estimated the capture rate of interstellar objects by means of three-body gravitational interactions to explore the implications of their model or the transfer of life by means of rocky material.

The study began a few months ago when the Pan-STARRS telescope detected the first ever interstellar asteroid, Oumuamua, and sought to determine its structure, origin and travel time. It eventually found with strong likelihood that there are thousands of such alien rocky material just floating around in our solar system, caught by our solar system acting as a de-facto "fishing net" from the ceaseless tug between the Sun and Jupiter.

6th February 2018