NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
DNA-testing
ESA/HUBBLE, NASA, ESO, M. KORNMESSER
Earth may contain
interstellar rocks
Leah Crane
BITS of Earth may originally be
from another part of the galaxy,
having crossed light years to
form the ground beneath our feet.
That is the conclusion of a study
suggesting that the Milky Way
should be full of free-floating
rocks like ‘Oumuamua, the
interstellar asteroid that visited
our solar system in October 2017.
They may help form planets.
Our conventional picture is that
planets form out of discs of gas
and fine dust around a star, but
some observations seem to show
them being born much faster
than that model predicts. Objects
like ‘Oumuamua may be the
solution to this discrepancy.
Researchers have estimated
that there should be about
29 trillion ‘Oumuamua-like
objects per cubic light year in our but you’re starting out with so
galaxy, floating free after having
been thrown out of their orbits
around their home stars. They are
likely to be relatively small, dark objects, thousands are likely to
and fast-moving, which is why
we have seen only one so far.
Michele Bannister at Queen’s
University Belfast, UK, and
Susanne Pfalzner at the Jülich
Supercomputing Center in
Germany found that these rocks
could play a crucial role in planet
formation if they get caught in
a disc around another star.
Many of the interstellar objects
should move too fast to get
caught, and most that do get
trapped are likely to fall into
the star. Nevertheless, the pair
calculated that there should be
“A fraction of planets
could have had an
‘Oumuamua at their heart.
It’s a lovely thought”
at least 10 million objects the size
of ‘Oumuamua (about 100 metres
across) or larger around every star
(arxiv.org/abs/1903.04451).
“It’s not a very efficient process,
many of them that you still end
up with plenty,” says Bannister.
Of the 10 million big interstellar
be more than a kilometre across,
and a few may be dwarf planets,
similar in size to Ceres or Pluto.
Interstellar objects like ‘Oumuamua
could help form planets
The interstellar exiles could
attract dust, pebbles and gas
with their gravity and eventually
become full-on planets. “A
fraction of planets could have had
an ‘Oumuamua at their heart,”
says Bannister. “You’re not going
to have any trace of it any more,
but it’s a lovely thought.”
This would skip the slow
inconvenience of building
planets out of tiny grains of dust.
“It would accelerate the planet-
formation process significantly,”
says Richard Alexander at the
University of Leicester, UK.
This mechanism would feed
back on itself: systems with more
planets kick out more rocks,
which create more planets in
other systems. “Planetary systems
are helping build planetary
systems,” says Bannister.
If that is the case, it could
explain why the earliest stars
seem to have fewer planets than
those that formed more recently.
Early generations of planets could
have formed the conventional
way and then gone on to seed
other planet-forming discs with
discarded ‘Oumuamuas. Planet
formation across the galaxy
should continually increase as
there are more and more stray
rocks flying around. ■
customers able
to deny the FBI
A BIG home DNA-testing company
has announced a way for its
customers to stop law-enforcement
agencies accessing their data.
FamilyTreeDNA recently faced
criticism when BuzzFeed News
revealed that the company had
chosen to cooperate with the FBI
without consulting customers.
Initially, the only way for people to
deny the FBI access to their data was
to opt out of the firm’s DNA-matching
service, depriving themselves of
a powerful tool for exploring their
family tree.
But on 12 March, FamilyTreeDNA
told customers that they could now
use the matching service but end
access by law-enforcement agencies.
“Users now have the ability to opt
out of matching with DNA relatives
whose accounts are flagged as being
created to identify the remains of
a deceased individual or a perpetrator
of a homicide or sexual assault,”
the company said in an email
outlining changes to its terms
and conditions for users.
Law-enforcement agencies must
now register through a special process
to access the company’s matching
service, FamilyTreeDNA said.
The combination of genetic data
from home DNA-testing kits and
family tree databases has allowed
individuals to find relatives by
matching DNA. It has also helped
police to solve crimes, such as last
year identifying the man thought
to be behind a series of murders in
California during the 1970s.
“It’s the lack of regulation and
oversight I’m concerned about,” says
Debbie Kennett at University College
London, who is a customer of the firm.
If the genetic information wasn’t held
by private companies, but instead
stored in a regulated, universal
database, there would be more control
and oversight over its use, she says.
“At the moment, there’s nothing
between the data and the police. It’s
the Wild West.” Adam Vaughan ■
23 March 2019 | NewScientist | 15