Alien Life

Astronomers from the University of Cardiff have proposed a theory that the comet carrying European Space Agency’s Rosetta craft could be home to microbial alien life. The proposal is in tune with the strange appearance of the comet.

The comet features black crust over lakes of ice, flat bottomed craters and mega-boulders scattered on the surface. All these characteristics point closely to the existence of life beneath its surface in the form of extremophiles which inhabit the most inhospitable regions of earth. Rosetta craft which is orbiting comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is said to have picked up strange clusters of organic material that resemble viral particles.

Astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe and his colleague Max Wills suspect that the comet racing towards sun at a speed of 32.9 km/second could be more hospitable to micro-life than the Arctic and Antarctic regions on earth. They came up with the theory after 67P’s gas ejections started at a distance from the sun too far away to trigger surface sublimation. This they concluded that the micro-organisms under the ice surface had been building pockets of high pressure gases to crack ice surfaces and vent organic particles. The duo presented their theory in a meeting at the Royal Astronomical Society.

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