Some scientists have proposed the existence of “living beings” inside the Sun. Our star is in an immense ball of plasma, a sea of atomic nuclei –essentially hydrogen and helium– and electrons gathered by gravity and supporting intense magnetic fields: it is from this material that life would be built. Using the flow of energy from the nuclear reactions inside, the solar organisms, baptized with the striking name “plasmobios” , would be formed thanks to the interaction between magnetic forces and moving electric charges, which would organize themselves into structures increasingly complex.
Mircea Sanduloviciu from the Cuza University in Romania took a step towards these plasmobios in 2003. Studying the formation of plasma in discharge chambers, he verified that spheres composed of two layers were spontaneously formed : one external with a negative charge –electrons– and another interior, positive –cations–. Inside, atoms of the gas contained in the chamber were locked up. The existence of a separation between an object and the environment – a membrane – is one of the criteria used to define a living cell. But the Sanduloviciu spheres also duplicate, they communicate information by radio waves so that the atoms of other spheres vibrate at the same frequency, metabolize and grow. For the Romanian scientist, his “creatures” could be found at the origin of other forms of life, totally different, in distant worlds.
A sad story associated with solar life is that of the retired German engineer G. Bueren, who in 1951 proposed that sunspots were holes that reached the interior of the Sun, where life could exist. What’s more, he publicly bet that scientists couldn’t prove that life on the Sun was impossible . The Astronomische Gessellschaft society sued him and he was sentenced to pay the bet. After his death 3 years after his “long live Cartagena”, this society created the Bueren Scholarship for young astronomers with the money. Now, Bueren could have been wrong only in the date. Within 5,000 million years, when the Sun becomes a red giant and its size expands to reach the Earth’s orbit, some astronomers suggest that our planet will not evaporate inside such a monster, but will be expelled and remain intact. . The most imaginative believe that under the red surface, at about 3000º C, some hyperthermophilic microorganisms could survive.
Going a little further, is life possible at the subatomic level? Obviously it would be a type of life that would not be based on electromagnetic interaction but on the two nuclear forces, the strong force (responsible for the cohesion of the atomic nucleus) and the weak force (which guides certain radioactive disintegrations). In this case, the time scale we would be talking about would not be centuries or years, like the human scale, but fractions of a second. At the subatomic level, everything is very small and happens tremendously fast. If we were a proton we would measure 10 -13 centimeters and we would move at a speed of 1,000 kilometers per second because for them the ambient temperature is subtly different: what for the human being is a comfortable 20º C for them is a million degrees.
Where could we find a place that would be something equivalent to our Earth for those subatomic beings? Radio astronomer Frank Drake proposed in 1973 that on the surface of a neutron star , a peculiar astronomical object with a mass of a few suns enclosed within a sphere 3 kilometers in diameter rotating on itself a thousand times per second . There, the matter is so concentrated and is at such high pressures that it appears in a kind of soup of neutrons and other subatomic particles that have names as peculiar as pions.
On the seething surface of a star like this, elementary particles travel at speeds of thousands of kilometers per second, or millions of kilometers per hour, which is equivalent to traveling thousandths of a centimeter in almost one trillionth of a second. Collisions between particles may very well create atomic nuclei unattainable by our laboratories , composed of thousands or even tens of thousands of protons and neutrons. Perhaps these nuclei disintegrate into lighter ones after a time infinitely shorter than a breath, in a million billionth of a second. It may seem almost instantaneous to us, but on the subatomic particle time scale it is a million times longer. Things can change a lot during that time to those mammoth nuclei.
In 1992 Tobias Owen and Donald Goldsmith went a step further and speculated about hypothetical “atomic life” on the surface of these stars. Why not imagine that the millions of collisions to which the particles in neutron stars are subjected could end up giving life forms that interact with each other in an organized way? If so, the evolution of that “life” would happen at a frenetic pace compared to ours . Its origin would not require a billion years but a billionth of a year, or what is the same, a thirteenth of a second.
Taking this assumption to the limit, we could even imagine civilizations that rise and fall in literally the blink of an eye. We are even able to intuit what type of electromagnetic radiation they would use to communicate: gamma rays, which arise naturally in the interaction between subatomic particles in the same way that visible light, the one we use, appears if we talk about atoms.
