Posted on behalf of Philip Ball.
UPDATE: Philip has written more about this in his Muse column. Read it here.
Extraterrestrials found at last! So far this headline seems conspicuous by its absence, despite the open-access publication in the Journal of Cosmology of a paper by Richard B. Hoover of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center claiming to see fossils of ancient extraterrestrial bacteria in several carbon-rich meteorites.
Hoover describes microscopic filaments in these so-called carbonaceous meteorites resembling those formed by known microorganisms, and which consist of a carbon-rich sheath filled with an inorganic mineral. He claims that his studies of the shape and chemical composition of these structures indicates that they “are indigenous fossils rather than modern terrestrial biological contaminants that entered the meteorites after arrival on Earth.” In other words, these fossil bacteria were carried by meteorite to Earth from other worlds – perhaps comets, or the icy moons of Jupiter or Saturn.
The Journal of Cosmology’s own Cosmology News quotes Carl Gibson of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences at Scripps Institute and the University of California at San Diego as saying “Dr Hover [sic] has provided the world with extraordinary evidence to back up extraordinary claims. This discovery completely changes our perspective of the nature of life and our place in the Universe. The world will never be the same.”
Yet similar claims have been made before, most notably in a paper that is oddly not cited by Hoover. None of these earlier claims has found general acceptance.
In an editorial comment, the Journal of Cosmology says “Given the controversial nature of his discovery, we have invited 100 experts and have issued a general invitation to over 5000 scientists from the scientific community to review the paper and to offer their critical analysis… In this way, the paper will have received a thorough vetting, and all points of view can be presented. No other paper in the history of science has undergone such a thorough analysis, and no other scientific journal in the history of science has made such a profoundly important paper available to the scientific community, for comment, before it is published. We believe the best way to advance science, is to promote debate and discussion.”
Several of these commentaries are already available. How many of them represent the views of ‘experts’ is for the reader to judge. Nature will shortly bring you its own assessment of this potentially world-changing news.
Image: photo by LabyrinthX via Flickr under Creative Commons