In February, NASA unveiled one of the most exciting astronomical finds in recent memory: TRAPPIST-1, a tiny star orbited by seven Earth-sized planets, all of which could conceivably support liquid water and three of which were in the star’s habitable zone.

Axar.az reports citing to Sputnik following NASA's announcement, postdoctoral student Sebastiaan Krijt with the University of Chicago posed a question: if life formed on one of the TRAPPIST worlds, could it spread to the others via space debris?

Krijt's findings, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, were that simple life forms could travel between the TRAPPIST worlds on the backs of debris kicked up by asteroids or comets.

TRAPPIST-1 is a supercool dwarf star, and all seven of its planets orbit it very closely. TRAPPIST-1b, the closest planet, is just over 1 million miles from its star, while the farthest world, TRAPPIST-1h, is about 5.8 million miles away. For comparison's sake, Mercury is about 36 million miles away from our sun.

And since the TRAPPIST-1 worlds are all very close to the star they orbit, that also means they're very close together. "Frequent material exchange between adjacent planets in the tightly packed TRAPPIST-1 system appears likely," said Krijt in a statement. "If any of those materials contained life, it's possible they could inoculate another planet with life."

This is far from likely to happen: first, life must form on one of the TRAPPIST worlds. Then, a large planetoid must collide with that world, expelling matter that has life on it into space. The material must move fast enough to escape the planet's gravitational pull, but not so fast as to kill the life on it. Then it has to collide with another TRAPPIST planet in short order, or else it'll die in the vacuum.