Nasa Scientist Claims To Have Found Extraterrestrial Bacteria

[Jay-qu]

Dr. Hoover has discovered evidence of microfossils similar to Cyanobacteria, in freshly fractured slices of the interior surfaces of the Alais, Ivuna, and Orgueil CI1 carbonaceous meteorites. Based on Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FESEM) and other measures, Dr. Hoover has concluded they are indigenous to these meteors and are similar to trichomic cyanobacteria and other trichomic prokaryotes such as filamentous sulfur bacteria. He concludes these fossilized bacteria are not Earthly contaminants but are the fossilized remains of living organisms which lived in the parent bodies of these meteors, e.g. comets, moons, and other astral bodies. The implications are that life is everywhere, and that life on Earth may have come from other planets.

 

Members of the Scientific community were invited to analyze the results and to write critical commentaries or to speculate about the implications. These commentaries will be published on March 7 through March 10, 2011.

 

http://journalofcosmology.com/Life100.html

[CraigD]

Wow! This is big news!

 

Hypotheses of the life originating not on Earth of a similar planet, but on small bodies with liquid water such as comets, have been a hot topic for many years, but the quality of Hoover's data, and its reception by the scientific community to date, seem to me unprecedentedly good.

 

To my amateur eye, the many micrographs printed in his paper look enough like impressions of cyanobacteria - tubular, bulbous on one end and hairy on the other, and on the order of 1e-4 m long - to convince me that's what they are, and his description of the material in which they were found and the procedure followed enough to convince me they're not the result of contamination with living cyanobacteria.

 

I look forward to hearing what pros think.

 

I'm also pleased that Hoover's findings and hypotheses support some of my pet biogenesis theories, which posits that an important factor in the development of life was the encapsulation of pre-biological chemicals in small, naturally occurring containers, such as bubbles in mud, allowing them to be cell-like before having the necessary biological mechanisms to form cells. Comets may contain such capsules, in which life may originated, the "mudballs" then being ejected from the comets when they are heated by the sun, to fall to the early Earth as carbonaceous chondrites meteorites, where their "biological payloads" were released and continued evolving.

[Jay-qu]

Yeah, it's pretty incredible. I also eagerly await the appraisal of other scientists in the field.

 

I wonder if its possible the meteorites had origin in the Earth's crust and were blown off by a larger meteorite impact long ago - only to now randomly fall back to Earth.. or has that been ruled out?

[Moontanman]

This is exciting but as I recall these structures have been found before in meteorites and been found to be non life due to the organic materials being equally left and right handed, has this changed?

[Turtle]

...I wonder if its possible the meteorites had origin in the Earth's crust and were blown off by a larger meteorite impact long ago - only to now randomly fall back to Earth.. or has that been ruled out?

 

checking.... :coffee_n_pc: ...so yeah; i think the classification as "CI1 carbonacious chondrite" rules out an earth origin. there is this from hoover's paper on the classification:

...The CI1 carbonaceous chondrites are the most primitive of all known meteorites in terms of solar elemental abundances and the highest content of volatiles. Carbonaceous chondrites are a major clan of chondritic meteorites that contain water, several weight % Carbon, Mg/Si ratios at near solar values, and oxygen isotope compositions that plot below the terrestrial fractionation line. The CI1 classification indicates the meteorites belong to the CI (Ivuna Type) chemical group and are of petrologic Type 1. The CI1 meteorites are distinguished from other carbonaceous chondrites by a complete absence of chondrules and refractory inclusions (destroyed by aqueous alteration on the parent body) and by their high degree (~20%) of indigenous water of hydration. The aqueous alteration took place on the parent bodies of the CI1 meteorites at low temperature (<50 oC) and produced hydrated phyllosilicates similar to terrestrial clays, carbonates and oxides magnetite Fe3O4 and limonite Fe2O3 . nH2O. Sparsely distributed throughout the black rock matrix are fragments and crystals of olivine, pyroxene and elemental iron, presolar diamonds and graphite and insoluble organic matter similar to kerogen.

...

[CraigD]

I wonder if its possible the meteorites had origin in the Earth's crust and were blown off by a larger meteorite impact long ago - only to now randomly fall back to Earth.. or has that been ruled out?

I’m pretty sure it’s ruled out, because CI1 carbonaceous chondrites meteorites like the 2 (Ivuna and Orgueil CI1 – 2 of the 5 known one – these are rare meteorites!) Hoover examined resemble have a very primordial composition including lots of volatile elements, not like ejecta meteorites (eg: the famous ALH 84001 achondrite meteorite), which resemble volcanic stone with the primordial volitiles boiled away.

 

This is exciting but as I recall these structures have been found before in meteorites and been found to be non life due to the organic materials being equally left and right handed, has this changed?

Hoover’s data and hypothesis aren’t, I think, a repeat of previous ones involving signs of life in meteorites.

 

I recall a lot of excitement ca. 1996 about ALH 84001 (see the Science magazine article Search for Past Life on Mars: Possible Relic Biogenic Activity in Martian Meteorite ALH84001), a meteorite thought with pretty good confidence to have been ejected from Mars about 15,000,000 years ago, reaching Earth about 13,000 years ago, due to a hypothesis by David McKay that small filament-like impressions in it were “nanobacteria” (bacteria about 1000 times smaller than present day bacteria) from Mars. This hypothesis was weak, and I think is now largely discredited, because there’s no modern equivalent or clear terrestrial fossil evidence of the hypothesize nanobacteria, and because several heat and chemical mechanisms that could account for these features were hypothesized.

 

Ivuna and Orgueil CI1 aren’t much like ALH 84001, and the features Hoover reports in them a good match for the size and shape (including the handedness of its helical structure) of present day cyanobacteria.

[Jay-qu]

Thanks for the clarification. This is even more interesting now..

[Moontanman]

The Bacterial find i was thinking of occurred in the early 1900's maybe late 1800's what appeared to be bacterial fossils were found in carbonaceous meteorites but they were dismissed as just look alikes due to the lack of one dominant chiral organic molecules or earth contamination. (i don't know how they could have it both ways).

[Moontanman]

I keep looking at those pics and all I see are crystals, I hope this is confirmed but they just look like crystals, the only thing that looks like a bacterium is the pic of the bacterium...

 

Too bad they can't get a pristine sample from the interior and see if they can culture viable organisms. Bacteria have been resurrected out of salt formations many millions of years old...

[Jay-qu]

Well NASA have do not support his findings.. Hoover actually works in solar physics branch of a NASA lab and doesn't have any qualifications in meteorites or astrobiology.

 

So unfortunately I think this is a crock :( real bacteria, but not really extra-terrestrial.

[Tekime]

Has anybody heard anything newsworthy regarding this paper in the last few days?

 

For a layperson such as myself, the paper is quite convincing. Not proof of anything, but enough to get one just a little bit excited.

 

I have to admit Dr. Hoover looks like a crock. The Journal of Cosmology is a joke. Half of the papers are full of typos and make absolutely ridiculous, thoroughly non-scientific "proofs". The fact that his paper is prefaced by a slur about it's integrity only work against it's integrity IMO. If this is so compelling why isn't it in Nature? The worst part is all the Amazon affiliate links pointing to corny books about alien life - not excluding a book written by Dr. Hoover himself. Whether it's true or not, all this exposure is sure to make them some money, and I definitely find the ulterior motive unprofessional.

 

But I'm still dying to hear from some other scientists. If it's a crock it should be easy to poke holes in the paper, right?

[Tekime]

Well at this point I can only conclude it's an unsubstantiated mess.

 

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=32928

 

The above article, the sheerly unprofessional nature of the "journal" he published in and a lack of any seriously compelling new evidence pretty much sums it up.