In the summer of 2001, over the Indian state of Kerala (this is the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent), it rained repeatedly with red drops for about two months. Local newspapers printed correspondent's notes and letters from readers surprised by the unusual phenomenon. The color of the water falling from the sky ranged from pink to bright red, comparable to the color of blood.
Particles that colored rainwater from southern India. The picture was taken under a microscope at a magnification of 1000 times.
The cells of the trentepolia algae are arranged one after the other, forming threads.
Physicist Godfrey Louis, who works at the University of Kottayam, India, and his student Santosh Kumar have collected more than 120 such reports from newspapers and other sources and many samples of unusual rainwater from different parts of the state. Placing the drops under a microscope, they saw in the water what gave it a red color: many rounded red particles with a diameter of 4-10 micrometers, in a milliliter - about nine million. After evaporating several samples, the researchers found that there are about one hundred grams of red sediment per cubic meter of water. According to Louis' estimates, during the several dozen episodes described in local newspapers, about five millimeters of rain fell per square kilometer of the area affected by the rain. This is 500 thousand cubic meters of water, that is, 50 tons of red dust.
Is it really dust? Wind-blown fine sand is sometimes transported over long distances. It can also be red. So, in July 1968, in the south of England, red thin sand from the Sahara fell out with rain. Dust from the Sahara is sometimes carried by the wind across the Atlantic Ocean and into America. But, according to Louis, the transfer from some remote areas can be excluded, since during the two months that the red rains were falling, the weather and wind direction changed more than once.
Under the microscope, the red particles do not look like sand, but like some biological objects like cells or spores, rounded, with a concave center and a thick wall. Chemical analysis showed the presence of 50% carbon and 45% oxygen (by weight) with small amounts of sodium and iron, which resembles the composition of living cells. Are the red particles spores of some kind of fungi or pollen washed off trees and roofs by rainwater? This is out of the question: red water also accumulated in buckets in open areas, far from trees and buildings. In addition, chitin is present in the spores of fungi, as in the mushrooms themselves, but it was not found in the particles of red rain.
Godfrey Louis put forward an unexpected hypothesis: red rain is associated with a meteor explosion in the upper atmosphere over Kerala.
In the early morning of July 25, a few hours before the first "bloody" rain, residents of Kottayam and the surrounding area heard a loud bang. The glass in the windows trembled. According to a survey of those who heard the explosion, the meteor flew from north to south and exploded over the town. Louis suggests that it was a fragment of some comet carrying extraterrestrial microorganisms. Part of them fell into the lower layers of the atmosphere and fell to the Earth with rainwater.
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His bold assumption fits into the channel of the so-called panspermia hypothesis, according to which life did not originate on Earth, but somewhere in space and in its primitive forms of some disputes or embryos under the influence of light pressure eternally migrates across the Universe on meteorites, comets, or simply as part of interstellar dust. So these disputes ended up on our planet, where, in favorable earthly conditions, evolution began, which gradually came down to man. The panspermia hypothesis was formed in the 19th century, it was supported by many prominent scientists, for example Svante Arrhenius and Hermann Helmholtz. Then it was already known that some lower organisms can endure vacuum and cold for a long time in a state of suspended animation, close to absolute zero, but science did not yet know anything about hard cosmic radiation. True, the few supporters of panspermia these days claimthat in the thickness of the meteorite, under the protection of its material, especially resistant microorganisms can survive.
What other options can you suggest? Still, it cannot be completely ruled out that these are spores of some algae, pollen, some unknown terrestrial microorganisms. Far from all the flora and microflora of the Earth has been studied, especially in India.
The concave middle part of the rounded formations and the red color are characteristic of mammalian erythrocytes. But 50 tons of red blood cells per square kilometer is too much. Not to mention the fact that red blood cells are completely destroyed in rainwater after a few minutes: to maintain their integrity, they need a saline solution of the same concentration as blood plasma. Spectrometry of the mysterious red particles in the optical range showed that they absorb light with a wavelength of 505 nanometers most strongly and there is still a small absorption peak at 600 nanometers. Ordinary hemoglobin with oxygen attached to it gives maximum absorption at 575 and 540 nanometers, and hemoglobin deprived of oxygen has one absorption band - about 565 nanometers. So if the particles of the "bloody" rain are still erythrocytes, then they are not the usual earthly hemoglobin.
Experts at the Tropical Botanical Garden in Kerala say it may be a spore of the terrestrial microscopic algae trentepolia common in India. The color of the cells of trentepolia is given by a pigment like carotene. Algae forms a red or yellow powdery coating on the bark of tropical rainforest trees. This assumption can be confirmed or refuted by comparing DNA. An analysis carried out in England, at the Universities of Sheffield and Cardiff, made it possible to detect DNA in the mysterious particles, but it has not yet been possible to reproduce it by the polymerase chain reaction method to study it in more detail.
In general, an earthly origin for red rain seems more likely. But even then the question arises - where did such a quantity of algae get into the sky? Is it really possible a tornado that would selectively remove from the bark of trees and raise only algae into the sky, without capturing any pieces of the bark itself or the leaves of the crown?
