Microbes can live and grow Within an atmosphere of hydrogen that is pure, laboratory experiments reveal.
Where astronomers search signs of life that is alien, the range of environments could widen.
It appears to maximize our odds that we may locate life elsewhere.
Her coworkers and seager put Yeast and E. coli — equally considered stand-ins for additional single-celled organisms — in small bottles with some nutrient broth.
The investigators displaced the air in six bottles and replaced it with pure hydrogen gas, pure helium gas or a mixture of 80 percent nitrogen and 20 percent carbon dioxide.
Every few hours, the Researchers removed a number of the microbes to count how many had been alive.
But seeking a Atmosphere is not enough, says astrobiologist John Baross of the University of Washington in Seattle.
Astrobiologists plan to search for signs of alien life by looking at starlight filtering through exoplanets’ atmospheres.
It’s not clear whether rocky Planets with hydrogen atmospheres exist.
We should not limit, or be overly Earth-centric, in what we consider interesting while we study other planets.