This looks to be a huge story, the first evidence of extraterrestrial life, if it holds up. I would remind readers that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence“. This needs to be confirmed by others in the science community before it can be taken seriously.
This is from a recent meteorite find in December 2012. A large fire ball was seen by a large number of people in Sri Lanka on December 29th 2012, during that episode a large meteorite disintegrated and fell to Earth in the village of Araganwila which is few miles away from the city of Polonnaruwa.
Look at what the electron microscope shows of a sample purported to be from the meteorite:
It looks convincing, and the paper says: “Contamination is excluded by the circumstance that the elemental abundances within the structures match closely with those of the surrounding matrix.“, but I remain skeptical of the claim.
At first I thought this was somebody mistaking a Tektite (Earthly origin ejecta from impact that makes it into space briefly) but this meteorite found in Sri Lanka does not appear to fit that category, being a chondrite. Further, this is a (supposedly) peer reviewed paper in the Journal of Cosmology, just published, but looking at the Journal of Cosmology, I have some doubts about its veracity.
I asked our resident solar expert Dr. Leif Svalgaard what he thought of it:
Credible? Yes and No. Several good scientists that I know personally have published in the Journal. There is also a good deal of junk. The kind of stuff that gets trotted out at WUWT by our resident [commenters] asking us to ‘open our minds’. So, there is both. It is difficult for a layman to sort the wheat from the abundant chaff.
Wickramasinghe is a credible scientist, student and long-time collaborator of Fred Hoyle. I assume you know Hoyle’s theory of continuous creation of matter at just the right rate to make the Universe expand as we observe it in order to keep the density constant. Hoyle coined the ‘derogatory’ [from his point of view] term The Big Bang. Hoyle’s greatest achievement was to co-author the epoch-making paper that explained in quantitative detail how all elements heavier than Lithium are formed in our universe [in supernovae explosions].
So, the jury is still out on the journal, though the scientist gets a +1.
According to the paper:
…the parent body of the Polonnaruwa meteorite would have had most of its interior porous volume filled with water, volatile organics and possibly viable living cells. A remarkable coincidence that should be noted is that within several days of the meteorite fall, an extensive region around the site of the fall experienced an episode of red rain. The red rain analysed at the MRI in Colombo has been shown to contain red biological cells that show viability as well as motility. Preliminary studies from EDX analysis show that these cells are similar to the cells found in the red rain of Kerala that fell in 2001, cells that have not yet been identified with any known terrestrial organism (Louis and Kumar, 2006; Gangappa et al, 2010). Abnormally high abundances of As and Ag in the Sri Lankan red rain cells have been provisionally reported, thus favouring a non-terrestrial habitat, possibly connected with a cometary/asteroidal body, the fragmentation of which led to the Polonnaruwa meteorite fall (Samaranayake and Wickramasinghe, 2012).
The paper is (h/t to Willis Eschenbach):
FOSSIL DIATOMS IN A NEW CARBONACEOUS METEORITE
N. C. Wickramasinghe*1, J. Wallis2, D.H. Wallis1 and Anil Samaranayake+3
1Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology, University of Buckingham, Buckingham, UK
2School of Mathematics, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
3Medical Research Institute, Colombo, Sri Lanka
ABSTRACT
We report the discovery for the first time of diatom frustules in a carbonaceous meteorite that fell in the North Central Province of Sri Lanka on 29 December 2012. Contamination is excluded by the circumstance that the elemental abundances within the structures match closely with those of the surrounding matrix. There is also evidence of structures morphologically similar to red rain cells that may have contributed to the episode of red rain that followed within days of the meteorite fall. The new data on “fossil” diatoms provide strong evidence to support the theory of cometary panspermia.
The full paper is here:
Source from the University of Buckingham website: http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Polonnaruwa-meteorite.pdf
Here is a news story on the paper, including an interview with Wickramasinghe
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Not that I would propound the theory, but it is possible that meteor impacts on the Earth drives pieces of terrestrial rocks [limestone with fossils?] into space [we have observed how that process works on Mars by collecting meteorites on Earth that definitely came from Mars] where they are scooped up by a passing comet or other meteorite parent.
REPLY: That’s why I thought “tektite” at first – Anthony
Totally pretentious to say a journal is good or bad (its the argum expertium fallacy) and any article is of limited value in itself until duplicated.
Michael says:
January 14, 2013 at 7:16 pm
Totally pretentious to say a journal is good or bad (its the argum expertium fallacy)
Experts can [and do] judge a journal that way, and there are good journals and bad journals, the latter perhaps with sloppy, poor, lax, or no peer-review process.
Once they went into the red rain of non-terrestrial origin hooey, they lost all credibility. Big. Fat. Fail.
My first thought, too, was that this was a piece of life “coming home.” Regardless, it’s interesting.
I would pull this post in a flash. It will be used to ridicule all the good science on this blog.
Paul Adomshick says:
January 14, 2013 at 7:24 pm
Once they went into the red rain of non-terrestrial origin hooey, they lost all credibility.
Wickramasinghe was also pushing the idea that biological viruses causing SARS was of extraterrestrial origin. Something for the ‘open-minded’ to soak up…
I read Hoyle’s Intelligent Universe as a Physics Major in the 1980’s and was convinced he is on the whole right.
The specifics of Hoyle’s theories may be found to be faulty but I share his conviction very deeply that life (DNA) is so incredibly adaptable that it MUST be present in space and it MUST get from one place to another given enough time. Similarly, I believe we will find life below the moho in the earth’s mantle.
I think that our generation suffers the same syndromes as previous generations that did not believe Copernicus when he realized we were not central to the solar system. Our generation remains convinced and all our text books preach that Earth (Gaia) is somehow special – a “goldilocks planet” and that it is one of the infinitely few places that has just the right conditions for life.
I am convinced that we will find that this is not the case and that DNA or other life forms not yet discovered have long inhabited many of what we thought were inhospitable places in the universe and another paradigm will fall – man will once again no longer be special or find ourselves in a “special place”.
If I had not got a “job” then this is the kind of research is precisely what I would have pursued.
Sounds a lot like a “piltdown man” type hoax. As in genuine scientists being fooled by a well placed fake sample. Time will tell.
On the likely hood scale I give it about a 2 out of 10. Looks like a common fossilised diatom a very terrestrial one. I’m hoping alien life won’t look exactly like terrestrial.
Jeremy says:
January 14, 2013 at 7:32 pm
The specifics of Hoyle’s theories may be found to be faulty but I share his conviction very deeply that life (DNA) is so incredibly adaptable that it MUST be present in space and it MUST get from one place to another given enough time.
It is not a given that all life has to based on DNA. I do agree that DNA [namely us] will colonize the whole Galaxy in a few hundred million years [if we survive ourselves for the next couple of hundred years]. Which may provoke Fermi’s question “Where is everybody”.
Most fascinating!
But I’m surprised the structure of an ‘extra terrestrial diatom’ would so much replicate that of a modern terrestrial example.
Michael says: January 14, 2013 at 7:16 pm
“….. of limited value in itself until duplicated….”
(from the Wickramasinghe paper) http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/polonnaruwa-meteorite.pdf
At least it’s not the jawbone of an Orangutan.
Jim B says:……. I’m hoping alien life won’t look exactly like terrestrial.
I’ll second that.
Oh God….
Watts. Not good. Science here only, SVP.
I don’t believe any of this hyperbolic alien-hyping shite.
Hoyle was the champion of the idea of life being distributed through the universe with the earth seeded by meteors.
So this find would be direct confirmation of his theory.
His long time collaborator Wickramasinghe must be thrilled to finally have found corroborative evidence.
The photo looks interesting and presumably if additional specimens are found on further study, it would be provocative. It looks so normal, so similar to other Earth based organisms that one wonders if it was really from elsewhere.
The meteorite falls in Sri Lanka on the 29th of December, they collect a sample, fly the sample to Cardiff, run it through the electron microscope, write a paper, submit it, have it referred and published all in 12days! Very fast…. too fast to have been checked properly.
Yeah, no… The red rain baloney was a dead giveaway. As Doug suggests, I’d delete this post.
We should hold judgment until other teams can get a look, and hopefully at other samples, contamination still being a real possibility. Is there any more information on the meteorite? There are many varieties.
What expertise have the co-authors in meteorites, diatoms, or paleontology? And “red rain” with “cells” in it? falling within a few days of the meteorite? It all sounds too mysterious.
Did you say CARBONaceous?
We’re DOOMED! It’s worse than we thought. Aliens are sequestering carbon here…THAT may be causing global warming… /sarc off
Drake equation has been superseded by the Westhaver Equation…
1= A^a x B^b x C^c …. N^n; where 1 is the number of planets where there is evidence of life,
and A, B, C, ….N are the number of coefficients raised to whatever power necessary to include any and all variables such that the product of all variables raised to their respective powers yields a probability of life on 1 planet in the universe.
The probability of # of planets with life in the universe is 1:infinity. Because THAT is what the evidence shows.
Random thoughts:
– Could it have been ejected from Earth 500-1000 million years ago?
– Some theories have Venus suffering a massive collision that reversed its rotation and slowed it to almost nothing,
– If from outside the solar system – how long might it have been in transit?
This claim, like those of warmist types, is bogus and is wrong
Cite “Louis, Kumar 2006,” and no one goes along
Wikramasinghe notes his “remarkable coincidence”
But fails to note the meteor came after “red rain” events
He doesn’t mention papers that belie his silly claim
And skips that one that shows him wrong has actually got his name!
The paper’s bogus science is just what this group deplores
We’ve known for ten years plus that these red rains are algae spores.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Look at the geology of the area. Reliant on my very distant recollections, diatoms do not fit the area. Open to correction of course.