London: Maybe this is what an alien really looks like – a worm-like bacteria.
NASA scientist Dr Richard Hoover claims to have found life form, which may explain how life on earth started and what’s more, he challenges anyone to come forth and disprove his claim.
An astrobiologist with Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Hoover explains that travelling to Antarctica, Siberia and Alaska he has studied an extremely rare form of meteorites - CI1 carbonaceous chondrites – of which only nine are known to exist on earth.
Under microscopes, these meteorites showed numerous different fossils of bacteria – some which are similar to ones on earth and others which are well, alien.
According to him, life on earth could have been planted by bacteria in an asteroid hitting the planet in its infancy.
In one case he found on a meteorite an organism similar in size and overall structure to the giant bacterium Titanospirillum velox, an organism found here on planet Earth.
“I interpret it as indicating that life is more broadly distributed than restricted strictly to the planet earth,” a newspaper quoted him as saying.
“The exciting thing is that they [the bacteria] are in many cases recognisable and can be associated very closely with the generic species here on earth,” he said.
He added, “There are some that are just very strange and don’t look like anything that I’ve been able to identify, and I’ve shown them to many other experts that have also come up stumped.”
In one of the remains, Hoover found no nitrogen.
“If someone can explain how it is possible to have a biological remain that has no nitrogen, or nitrogen below the detect ability limits that I have, in a time period as short as 150 years, then I would be very interested in hearing that,” he said.
“I’ve talked with many scientists about this and no one has been able to explain.”
Dr Rudy Schild, editor-in-chief of the journal Cosmology, said, “Given the controversial nature of his discovery, we have invited 100 experts and have issued a general invitation to over 5,000 scientists from the scientific community to review the paper and to offer their critical analysis.”
The findings are published in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology.
ANI
First Published: Sunday, March 06, 2011, 15:18