ARCHIVE CCAB & RELATED NEWS
2008
Antarctic analogue for Mars and Comets:
Cometary panspermia supported
A NEW PHD IN ASTROBIOLOGY
NEW THEORY OF THE ORIGIN OF LIFE
Extraterrestrial nucleosides prove cometary panspermis
12 December 2004
New Book: A Journey with Fred Hoyle
Chandra Wickramasinghe's new book "A
Journey with Fred Hoyle" published by World Scientific
and Imperial College London Press is to appear this month and has
already had some good reviews. The content is of general popular
interest. Sir Martin Rees (Astronomer Royal) gave a comment printed
on the cover: “An enlightening account of a 40 year scientific
collaboration between two remarkable men…” and the New
Scientist previewed it in a recent issue.
See Review
2 December 2004
PRESENT-DAY LIFE ON MARS AND EPIDEMIC THREAT
In a paper published in Science, J. Kargel points out that
contemporary microbial life on Mars must be assumed to exist until
such time as it is proved to the contrary. He goes on to say that
the importation of such microbes on to the Earth could be fraught
with danger to terrestrial life. These arguments may sound familiar
to those who have read Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe (Diseases
from Space, 1979; Life on Mars, 1997). See London
Times Report
28 October 2004
COMET STRIKE SURPRISINGLY MORE LIKELY
Research conducted by a Cardiff University astronomy scientist suggests that a comet colliding with Earth is actually more likely than was previously believed.
 Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, Honorary Professor Bill Napier and research student Janaki Wickramasinghe of Cardiff University’s Centre for Astrobiology believe that some comets are not visible using current astronomical scanning equipment. They argue that if this is the case, international programmes designed to detect near-Earth asteroids, and ways to reduce the worst effects of them colliding with Earth may need to be urgently reviewed.
Professor Wickramasinghe said, "It’s possible that we are missing many of these Earth-threatening objects and we need to think again about mitigating strategies - some of which assume decades or centuries of warning before impact."
The team has found that the surfaces of inactive comets, if composed of loose, fluffy organic material like cometary meteoroids, develop such small reflectivities - they appear invisible. The near-Earth objects may therefore be dominated by a population of fast, kilometres-wide bodies, too dark to be seen with current surveys.
A new NASA mission will scan the entire sky with an infrared telescope - like a powerful set of night vision goggles to search for cool, or failed, stars, called brown dwarfs, and also dark comets and cometary fragments, of the type proposed by Professor Wickramasinghe and his team, that pose a previously unrecognised threat to our planet.
25 October 2004
Doctor of Science Award
Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe was awarded the degree of Doctor of
Science (Honoris Causa) from Sri Lanka (Rhuhuna
University)
29 September 2004
JOHN SNOW MEMORIAL LECTURER
Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe was the John Snow Memorial Lecturer and medallist of the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland. His lecture was titled "Our Quest for Origins".
20 September 2004
CARDIFF SCIENTISTS DISCOVER 'HIDDEN MOON'
Scientists at Cardiff University believe they have discovered a moon orbiting the most distant object in our solar system — yet it is so dark it is virtually invisible.
They believe that the moon, orbiting Sedna, is more like an extinct comet than a rocky planetary body, and that it has remained undetected because it is so sooty that it reflects virtually no light.
Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, Director of the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology, said the 'frozen smoke' is so black because much of it is empty space. With such a pitted structure, the moon would absorb more than 99% of all the light that hit it, the researchers calculate.
 The clue to the moon’s existence lies in Sedna's unusually slow rotation. The planetoid turns on its axis just once every 20 Earth days, leading astronomers to suspect that it is being slowed by the gravity of a partner.
(Image courtesy of NASA)
Sedna was spotted in November 2003 by Michael Brown and colleagues at the California Institute of Technology. Professor Wickramasinghe's team, including Janaki Wickramasinghe, a research student in the School of Mathematics, and Professor Bill Napier, Honorary Professor at Cardiff University, used Brown's telescope data to examine Sedna's rotation and weigh up the likely force exerted on it by any mysterious moon.
The dark body would be pitch-black, with a "fluffy, feathery surface" said Professor Wickramasinghe.
Professor Wickramasinghe said that, if this discovery proves to be correct, there may well be hundreds of such objects, lurking beyond Neptune and Pluto. "If Sedna has captured such an object, it must be from a significant population in the outer reaches of the Solar System," he told news@nature.com.
25 February 2002
RECENT FLOODS ON MARS
Scientists at the University of Arizona claim that water exceeding the volume of Lake Erie flooded Mars within the past 10 million years. Photographs from the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft shows few impact craters in the bed left by the flood, showing that the deluge was recent. Similar events of flooding may have taken place close to the end of the last Ice Age on Earth, 10 million years ago.
22 February 2002
MICROBES SURVIVE AT ENORMOUS PRESSURES
In an article published in this week's Science, a team of scientists have hown that common microorganisms includingE.coli survive and replicate at extremely high pressures, equivalent to depths of 50 km in the Earth's crust or under an hypothetical ocean 170km deep. These results give enhanced credibility ot the idea of life under the icy crust of Europa, and in deep planetary interiors (Anurag Sharma et al., "Microbial Activity at Gigapascal Pressures" p 1514-1516 v 295, Science, 22 Feb 2002.] It should be recalled that similar results were published by S. Al-Mufti over 10 years ago ("The Survival of E.Coli under extremely high pressures" - S. Al-Mufti, F. Hoyle and N.C. Wickramasinghe, in Fundamental Studies and the Future of Science ed. C. Wickramasinghe (University College, Cardiff Press, 1984). More at Click for article in Space Daily
5 December 2001
BACTERIA GIVE EUROPAN FISSURES THEIR PINK HUE
 Brad Dalton at NASA has claimed that the bacterial pigments could be the answer to the mysterious pink colour of the Jovian satellite Europa. The spectra of these regions on the Europan surface is claimed to match the spectra of extremophile bacteria. Similar arguments were made by Hoover, Hoyle, Wickramasinghe et al as early as 1986 (R.B. Hoover et al, Earth, Moon, and Planets, 35, 19-45). More at Click for report in New Scientist
9 January 2002
BACTERIA SURVIVE IN SPACE
A team of scientists led by Gerda Gorneck conducted a series of experiments aboard Russian satelites from 1994-199 showing microbes can survive in the near space environment of the Earth for considerable periods under suitable conditions. This work gives support for the theories of panspermia. More at Click for article
27 October 2001
COSMIC DRAGONS
 Chandra Wickramasinghe's new book entitled Cosmic Dragons: Life and Death on our Planet (Souvenir Press, 2001) is published this month and has been reviewed in many broadsheets and magazines. New Scientist in its October 27, 2001 issue writes thus:
"The case for interstellar panspermia - seeding of Earth with microorganisms from the stars - is getting stronger. For one thing, the oldest evidence of life has been pushed back to about 4 billion years ago, greatly shrinking the time available for life to evolve from non-life. For another, we now know that bacteria can survive space-like conditions: extreme heat, desiccation for a quarter of a billion years in a salt crystal, impacts at 10 kilometres per second if embedded in a suitable matrix, and hard radiation even inside a nuclear reactor. Add to this the general acceptance of planetary panspermia, the transference of microorganisms between objects in the Solar System, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that interstellar panspermia is an idea whose time has come.
The chief proponent of this controversial idea is astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe. In his entertaining and thought-provoking Cosmic Dragons, he sets out the case in thorough and compelling detail. In case you wondered, the "dragons" of his title are comets, the hypothetical means by which biological material is ferried back and forth between planetary systems and interstellar space.
You can't help rooting for Wickramasinghe. After all, if life turns out to be a cosmic rather than a planetary phenomenon, it will undoubtedly be the most important and mind-blowing discovery in the history of science. Fred Hoyle, Wickramasinghe's long-time friend and collaborator who died recently, believed that the case would not be proved in his lifetime. One wonders whether, if he had lived another 10 yars, he would have been quite so pessimistic."
18 October 2001
THE OLDEST SURVIVING MICROBE
 In an article published in Nature today (18 October 2001), Russell Vreeland of West Chester University in Pennsylvania and his colleagues have reported having successfully revived a bacterium after it apparently remained dormant for 250 million years, encased in a salt crystal in a New Mexico salt mine. If confirmed, the ancient bacteria would earn the title of "oldest living life form ever found". The previous record of survival of an ancient bacterium was one found living inside a bee that had been encased in amber for 25 million to 40 million years. This new work goes a long way in the direction of supporting the idea that microbial life can have near-eternal persistence.
30 July 2001
Detection of living cells at 41km in the stratosphere
 Chandra Wickramasinghe presented the preliminary results of analysis of stratospheric air samples that were brought to Cardiff in March 2001 at the SPIE Conference on Instruments, Methods, and Missions for Astrobiology IV held at San Diego. The project that led to these results was led by Professor Jayant V. Narlikar, Director of the Inter-Universities Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune India, as Prinicipal Investigator and Chandra Wickramasinghe as Co-Principal Investigator. The biological work in Cardiff was carried out by Professor David Lloyd and Melanie Harris, our newly appointed Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Bacterial cells were detected using a technique that involved staining with a fluorescent cyanine dye that is sensitive to transmembrane potential. The detection of bacterial cells at 41 km is taken as prima facie evidence of a space incidence of microorganisms. The average daily incidence of bacteria amounts to one third of a tonne averaged over the entire Earth. Microorganisms in the ower air would not normally rise above the tropopause (16km over the launch site of the collecting devices),and any that are carried in the rarest events would settle to the ground on a short timescale. To see the text of our paper
- Click here
31 January 2001
Detecting pyrolysis products from Martian bacteria
"Detecting pyrolysis products from bacteria on Mars" Earth and Planetary Science Letters 185 (2001) Daniel P. Glavin, Michael Schubert, Oliver Botta, Gerhard Kminek, Jefrey L. Bada
Dr. Gilbert Levin published a paper disputing the negative findings by the Viking GCMS organic analysis instrument in 1979. The important role the GCMS played was to invalidate any biologically interpretation if it found no evidence for organic molecules on Mars. Now almost three decades after the Viking biology experiments conducted their tests on the Martian soil, this new study showing the insensitivity of the Viking GCMS on typical Earth soils certainly makes a case for the Viking biology experiments to be re-examined. Levin says his Viking biology experiment (conducted on Martian soil nine times) detected living microorganisms on Mars in 1976. Click for article
29 January 2001
First steps to cell formation in simulated space conditions?
Duplicating the harsh conditions of cold interstellar space in their
laboratory, NASA scientists have created primitive cell-like structures that mimic the
membrane structures found in all living things. It has been argued on the basis of these experiments that the self assembly of chemical compounds in space
may have played a part in the origin of life.
For more details of NASA asrobiologists' claim Click here
FLASHBACK! In a paper entitled "Primitive grain clumps and organic compounds in carbonaceous chondrites" Nature, 264, 45, Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe argued for the first steps in cell formation occuring in interstellar clouds. The newly reported experimental work addresses the same issue, but it should be stressed that the formation of mebrane structures and living cells may be a whole universe apart.
Recent papers:
ANALYSIS OF RED RAIN OF KERALA (Dec 2006)
Bird flu pandemic: Could the virus fall
from the skies? - N.C. Wickramasinghe
(January 2006)
Extreme albedo comets and the impact hazard - W.M. Napier,
J.T. Wickramasinghe and N.C. Wickramasinghe, Mon Not RAS,
355, 191-195(2004) (pdf file)
Interstellar transfer of planetary microbiota - Max K. Wallis
and N.C. Wickramasinghe, Mon Not RAS, 348, 52-61(2004) (pdf
file)
The Universe: a cryogenic habitat for microbial life - Chandra
Wickramasinghe, Cryobiology, 48, 113-125 (2004) (pdf
file)
Confirmation of the presence of viable but non-culturable bacteria
in the stratosphere - M. Wainwright, N.C. Wickramasinghe, J.V.
Narlikar, P. Rajaratnam and J. Perkins, Int. J. Astrobiology,
3(1), 13-15 (2004) (pdf file)
Panspermia 2003: New horizons - N.C. Wickramasinghe, M.
Wainwright and J.T. Wickramasinghe, Proceedings of SPIE,
Vol. 5163, 222-228, 2004 (pdf file)
The interpretation of a 2175A absorption feature in the gravitational
lens galaxy SBS0909+53f2 at z=0.83 - N.C. Wickramasinghe, J.T.
Wickramasinghe and E. Mediavilla, Astrophysics and Space Science,
in press (pdf file)
Radiation pressure on bacterial grain clumps in the solar vicinity
and their survival between interstellar transits - N.C. Wickramasinghe
and J.T. Wickramasinghe, Astrophysics and Space Science,
in press (pdf file)
SARS - a clue to its origins - C. Wickramasinghe, M. Wainwright
and J. Narlikar, The Lancet, Vol. 361, May 24, p.1832 (2003)
(pdf file)
Detection of Microorganisms at High Altitudes - J.V. Narlikar,
N.C. Wickramasinghe, M. Wainwright, P. Rajaratnam, Current Science,
85 (No.1), p.29, 2003 (pdf file)
Frinctional heating of micron-sized meteoroids in the Earth's
upper atmosphere - S.G. Coulson and N.C. Wickramasinghe, Mon
Not RAS, 343, 1123-1130 (2003) (pdf file)
The expanding horizons of cosmic life - N.C. Wickramasinghe,
J.V. Narlikar, J.T. Wickramasinghe & M. Wainwright, Proceedings
of SPIE, Vol. 4859 , 154-163, 2003
(pdf file)
"Evidence of photoluminescence
of biomaterial in space" - N.C. Wickramasinghe, D. Lloyd and J.T.
Wickramasinghe [Proc SPIE, 4495, 255-260, 2002] (PDF File)
"Microorganisms cultured from stratospheric air samples obtained at 41km" - M. Wainwright, N.C. Wickramasinghe, J.V. Narlikar & P. Rajaratnam [FEMS Microbiology Letters, 218, 161-165, 2003] (PDF File)
"Progress towards the vindication of panspermia" - N.C. Wickramasinghe, M. Wainwright, J.V. Narlikar, P. Rajaratnam, M.J. Harris and D. Lloyd [Astrophys.Sp.Sci., 283, 403-413, 2003] (PDF File)
"Cross-linked
heteroaromatic polymers in interstellar dust" - N.C. Wickramasinghe,
D.T. Wickramasinghe and F. Hoyle [ApSS, 275, 181-184,
2001]
"A bacterial fingerprint in a Leonid meteor
train" - N.C. Wickramasinghe and F.Hoyle [ApSS, 277,
625-628, 2001]
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