Watching meteors flashing across the sky is a relaxing occupation on a clear evening. About ten times a year in the US, we can watch the showers come raining in (1). The light pollution in the cities, make watching difficult, so a drive to a quiet spot out of town is called for.
Of course only the larger of the meteors make it all the way in and there are some old ones that have been recovered. Dr. Hoover of NASA in Alabama has sliced some of these oldies open and found what seems to be the fossilized remains of a blue-green algae, that is, a cyanobacterium like the ones we find here on earth living in very inhospitable conditions (2). The samples are very old, and the lack of nitrogen that was in our atmosphere at that time, indicate that the fossils are extraterrestrial.
The idea that we are all immigrants, even bacteria, isn’t new but it would be nice to know who has been throwing rocks at us. There is a call for scientific paper, on the topic and its implications, already out and the commentaries are due to be published from tomorrow through the 10th March. Hopefully, we won’t find out that ‘Men are from Mars, and Woman are from Venus’, but we’ll all have the same number to phone home.
1. http://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/earthskys-meteor-shower-guide
2. http://journalofcosmology.com/Life100.html
Love it! <3∞
Ha, finally proof that life can exist elsewhere. Dun dun duunnn. Woohoo. Party in space.