The reason why we published this paper is not because we wanted to suggest this could evolve into life, but because we wanted to start the discussion … once more of what exactly do we mean by life.” However, Gregor Morfill, another team member, from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, states in the same article, “I would hesitate to call it life. Tsytovich, of the Russian Academy of Science, states in the article “ Hot Gas in Space Mimics Life,” “These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to quality them as candidates for inorganic living matter.” The researchers suggest that the final shape allows the dust to better adapt to and survive in their environment. It appeared to the scientists that the group of dust particles could reproduce, transferring the information acquired as to its helix shape into the next generation. The shape was held together by electromagnetic forces. Plasma is the fourth state of matter (the other three being gas, liquid, solid), which is ionized gas, such as what is found in stars. Thus, they join together in a string-like configuration and then twist themselves into spiral (corkscrew-like) shapes.ĭNA is deoxyribonucleic acid, the substance that carries an organism's genetic information. An international team of researchers, from Russia, Germany, and Australia, suggest from their study that when electrically charged interstellar dust particles (those in plasma, the fourth state of matter) are in a microgravity environment of space (commonly called zero gravity) they are attracted to each other.

Helix shape