Space for life!
for the first time ever, a joint team of Indian and British scientists have found bacterial cells believed to be from outer space. According to them, it is the first real evidence of the presence of living organism floating in the Earth's stratosphere.
"Air samples collected aseptically over tropical India at various stratospheric altitudes ranging from 20-41 km using cryosampler assemblies carried on balloons have shown evidence of living microbial cells,' states a research paper recently released by the scientists. The team included scientists from the Cardiff University, the uk, Bangalore-based Indian Space Research Organisation ( isro ), Pune-based Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (tifr), Mumbai.
Chandra Wickramasinghe of Cardiff University outlined the findings of the experiment at a recent meeting of the International Society for Optical Engineering in San Diego, usa . He told the conference that a balloon flight at an altitude of 41 km had recovered the clumps of microbes. Preliminary findings, which are inconclusive, indicate that the bacterial cells may have come from outer space, he added. "They look like terrestrial cells, but it's exceedingly unlikely that they could have been lifted up from the ground in the quantity that we find
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