gone back to colonize the planets back again. That's cometary panspermia. Some people have postulated that the universe is actually percolated with materials that contain, could contain, forms of life preserved in them, and they could be seeding the universe throughout.
Because what this tells me is I can actually go to a telescope like Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope, I can collect light that's filtering through that cometary tail, and it's going to leave fingerprints of what that cometary tail is made out of. That gives me a direct probe into what these planets are actually made out of.
That's one of the US instruments from Alan Stern and SWRI. And some of those theories involve cometary bombardment periods.
They're mostly thinking on two different types of more local panspermia-- cometary panspermia, planetary panspermia. The first one, cometary , is the idea that our solar system didn't come out of nowhere. Our sun formed from the accumulation of gas that resulted from the explosion of a previous sun.
But panspermia fans are not really clinging their hopes on this interstellar panspermia. They're mostly thinking on two different types of more local panspermia-- cometary panspermia, planetary panspermia. The first one, cometary , is the idea that our solar system didn't come out of nowhere.
And you're gonna see a little bit more about that momentarily. And as this occurs, that ice with the UV impinging on it can make big molecules. And here's what we then published after a couple of years of work. "Self-assembling amphiphilic molecules: Synthesis of simulated interstellar/pre-cometaryprecometary ices." So the answer to where the stuff in the Murchison came from is it was, a lot of it anyway, was synthesized on the surface of these little dust particles that I'm gonna show you in
It's full of nanodiamonds, tiny little diamonds, microscopic size, which are classic product of comet impacts, microspherules, some platinum, some iridium. All signatures of a cometary impact. And there it is. It's about 5 in thick. That layer is the Younger Dryas boundary layer. It dates to 12,800 years ago.
But once you get to the edge of the Kuiper Belt, it sort of becomes no man's land. We have a region called the scattered disk, which is just some random objects which are probably mostly cometary and they're kind of on crazy orbits a little bit and we don't understand them a whole lot, but they are-- we can't see all of them-- but they're kind of we know that they're there.
And specifically, Rosetta is really the truest sense of space exploration. And I'll talk a little bit about some of the things that we learned about comets that if you'd polled all the cometary scientists before, they would have all been 180 degrees in the opposite direction before.
So what you actually see is something like this. Right? It takes longer for the brightness to come back up on the right-hand side, because the planet has this tail, this cometary tail. I think this is astoundingly interesting.
And Lou Allamandola was an astrochemist. He's still active at NASA Ames. And Jason Dwoarkin had just finished his Ph. D.Ph.D. with Stanley Miller and wanted to do his post-doctoral work in the astrochemistry laboratory with Lou. So, we decided to see whether this stuff that Lou was synthesizing as a simulation of what goes on in what is called pre-cometary ice. And you're gonna understand that. I gotta show you a few more things before you understand it completely. But what he does is cool a chamber, a vacuum chamber, down to liquid