62 lines
2.6 KiB
Plaintext
62 lines
2.6 KiB
Plaintext
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SUBJECT: AP, SCIENTISTS DISCOVER BACTERIA CLOUD ? FILE: UFO1408
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=START= XMT: 16:18 Mon Jul 16 EXP: 16:00 Tue Jul 17
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CLOUDS OF BACTERIA SWIRLING THROUGH SPACE, SAYS SCIENTIST
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SYDNEY (JULY 16) REUTER - Our universe may be filled with germs, an
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international astronomy conference was told on Monday.
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Astrophysicist Gurcharan Kalra of India's University of Delhi told a meeting of
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the International Astronomical Union in Sydney that interstellar dust,
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prevalent throughout the universe, may be brimming with bacteria and minute
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plants.
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He said samples of light from regions near the center of our galaxy closely
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resembled light passed through E. Coli bacteria and through tiny sea plants
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called diatoms.
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This suggests that warm regions of space rich in dust may also be filled with
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bacteria and other simple forms of life.
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Although Kalra at first thought the concept ''obviously absurd,'' the
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correlations between the two sets of light were so close that he could not
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discount the data outright, he said.
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Suggestions that vast clouds of bacteria exist in space were first made by
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British astrophysist Fred Hoyle in 1982. However, his research was largely
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ignored by scientists who baulked at the idea of a universe filled with germs.
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To put the issue to rest, Kalra set out to debunk Hoyle's theory but found the
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results harder to deny than he first thought.
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Taking infra-red images of dust in the GC-IRS 7 region of our Milky Way galaxy,
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as Hoyle had done, and comparing them with a graph of E. Coli bacteria heated
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at 350 degrees Celsius (630 degrees Fahrenheit), the estimated temperature of
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some of the dust in that area, Kalra found the two graphs to be very similar.
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''The agreement between the observed and the predicted fluxes (results) is
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indeed quite striking,'' he told atronomers at the meeting. Hoyle's data cannot
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be dismissed, he added.
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Kalra told Reuters he will next seek to replicate Hoyle's bacterial data, and
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try and match the data with light samples from other dust-filled regions of
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space.
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He said astronomers have relied on similar light experiments to explain much of
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the universe, and cannot now dismiss the same method when it appears to support
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an unpopular conclusion.
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''All this information comes to us from the same light. If we get this
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information from it we should not reject it. It is also a lesson for me -- I
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should not have looked at it with the idea that this is rubbish to be quickly
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disproved,'' he said.
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=END=
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**********************************************
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* THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo *
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**********************************************
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