Could a microbe draw in dust using electretic quartz?

Question

The microbes reside in the rings around a gas giant, adhering to cosmic dust and feeding on sunlight and carbon minerals. While it seems there should be enough collisions to keep the microbes in circulation, I feel something a little more active will be necessary for an increase in complexity

My current idea would be for the microbes to evolve an electretic exoskeleton made of quartz. It seems that quartz is a good natural material for an electret, and certain bacteria are capable of creating quartz already. There are also electric organisms, including bacteria, which deal with electric charges, and that could adapt into organelles for creating electrets. Furthermore, there should be a lot of silicon/oxygen availible in the dust and rocks, which will provide resources for the electret

This electretic exoskeleton would attract dust to the meteoroids that these microbes reside on, thus increasing their resources and allowing for further complexity, or for survival in more resource-poor regions

Could this adaptation work as I've described within realistic biology and physics, or is there something I've overlooked here?

Answer 1

This is an interesting question. There are a few aspects that might matter.

1. The electrostatic forces on small particles are stronger than
   gravity.

2. There is a tendency for charge neutrality, if the material is polarized and has the same number of positive and negative charges, and the electret is because of separation of charge

3. In the space environment you have a lot of charged particles in
   solar wind, cosmic rays, etc.

The first point would impact how close and how easily the charged particles would get close to each other. It also can do things like order the particles into a line or a crystal depending on how the forces balance out.

The second point is perhaps important if the microbe is separating the charge and the little microbes become positive on one end and negative on the other end. But are other wise charge neutral. This would also impact how the might organize spatially of how close they could come together. In the presence of an electric field perhaps they could also change their orientation.

The third point is related to how the microbes might get charged up by the external radiation. e.g. solar wind. Satellite can have a problem with charge build up. Also depending where you are in space if you get too much charge, you can spark into a plasma.

For charged to be trapped, if the material is a good insulator like an oxide, it can be trapped for a long time, (although it may move and redistribute at slow times scales.

Another fun thing to think about is that the radiation can produce an ionization trail in the microbe, this is destructive to our DNA, but maybe the cosmic microbe could have some way to separate the holes and electrons and use it as an energy source.

Answer 2

No, a microbe cannot draw in dust using electric quartz. Electric quartz is a type of crystal that can create an electric field, which can be used to attract or repel charged particles. However, dust is made up of very small particles that are not electrically charged, so the electric field created by the electric quartz would not be able to attract or repel the dust.