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A new research claims that some tiny fossilized bacteria detected in the samples of three meteorites are not native to Earth, according to Reuters report Sunday.
The report by Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, was published late Friday in the Journal of Cosmology. It focuses on the evidence of microfossils which look like the filaments on cyanobacteria- blue-green algae- on the freshly fractured inner surfaces of three meteorites.
The research finding of Hoover, if confirmed, would indicate life may have a wider planetary distribution than simply being limited to the planet Earth and that microbial life could well exist on comets or icy worlds such as Europa or Enceladus.
Hoover's discovery stirred the world of cosmic science. It became the subject of dramatic news conferences and aroused a heated debate over its validity. The controversy is likely to focus on whether the filamentary structures are truly biological in origin, and if so, whether they are the result of earthly contamination.
Today an increasing number of microbiologists cast doubt upon Hoover's claims in his paper. "As a microbiologist who has looked at thousands of microbes through a microscope, and done some of my own electron microscopy, I see no convincing evidence that these particles are of biological origin," said Rocco Mancinelli, senior research scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute.
As concerns grew for the truth of Hoover's claims, Rudy Schild, the editor-in-chief with the Journal of Cosmology, said in a public statement that 100 experts and over 5,000 scientists from the scientific community had been invited to review the paper and to offer their critical analysis. Their commentaries would be published beginning Monday.
Hoover was not the first one to have claimed the discovery of extraterrestrial microbial life. The 1996 research by NASA scientists showed a meteorite found in Antarctica carrying evidence of fossilized microbial life forms, but it met criticism without the support of any conclusive proof.
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