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=START=   XMT: 16:18 Mon Jul 16  EXP: 16:00 Tue Jul 17

CLOUDS OF BACTERIA SWIRLING THROUGH SPACE, SAYS SCIENTIST

SYDNEY (JULY 16) REUTER - Our universe may be filled with
germs, an international astronomy conference was told on
Monday.

Astrophysicist Gurcharan Kalra of India's University of
Delhi told a meeting of the International Astronomical Union
in Sydney that interstellar dust, prevalent throughout the
universe, may be brimming with bacteria and minute plants.

He said samples of light from regions near the center of our
galaxy closely resembled light passed through E. Coli
bacteria and through tiny sea plants called diatoms.

This suggests that warm regions of space rich in dust may
also be filled with bacteria and other simple forms of life.

Although Kalra at first thought the concept ''obviously
absurd,'' the correlations between the two sets of light
were so close that he could not discount the data outright,
he said.

Suggestions that vast clouds of bacteria exist in space were
first made by British astrophysist Fred Hoyle in 1982.
However, his research was largely ignored by scientists who
baulked at the idea of a universe filled with germs.

To put the issue to rest, Kalra set out to debunk Hoyle's
theory but found the results harder to deny than he first
thought.

Taking infra-red images of dust in the GC-IRS 7 region of
our Milky Way galaxy, as Hoyle had done, and comparing them
with a graph of E.  Coli bacteria heated at 350 degrees
Celsius (630 degrees Fahrenheit), the estimated temperature
of some of the dust in that area, Kalra found the two graphs
to be very similar.

''The agreement between the observed and the predicted
fluxes (results) is indeed quite striking,'' he told
atronomers at the meeting.  Hoyle's data cannot be
dismissed, he added.

Kalra told Reuters he will next seek to replicate Hoyle's
bacterial data, and try and match the data with light
samples from other dust-filled regions of space.

He said astronomers have relied on similar light experiments
to explain much of the universe, and cannot now dismiss the
same method when it appears to support an unpopular
conclusion.

''All this information comes to us from the same light. If
we get this information from it we should not reject it. It
is also a lesson for me -- I should not have looked at it
with the idea that this is rubbish to be quickly
disproved,'' he said.

=END=

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