8 Awesome Ways Life Could Be Forming In The Universe

4. Non-Planetary Life

Okay, so we can just about conceive of life around black holes and on gas giants, but one thing we tend to cling on to is that all life needs a "home" - a planet, a space station, anything - but the universe is generally made up of a whole load of empty space, so would it be possible for life to form in the abundant nothingness?

There are some who say yes. Physicist Vadim Tsytovich and his colleagues have demonstrated through computer models that when you suspend cosmic dust particles in plasma and expose it to some kind of charge, it starts to behave in a very lifelike manner, self-organising into a helical structure and creating a kind of inorganic life in the spaces between stars. These strands of dust can even pass on characteristics to its "offspring".

Granted, this isn't exactly the spaceship-and-probe based arrangement that tends to spring to mind when we imagine alien life forms, but it goes to show that f we're going to look for our galactic neighbours, we might have to be a bit more imaginative.