Raining Extraterrestrial Microbes in Kerala?

jdfox writes "World Science is reporting on a controversial paper to be published shortly in the peer-reviewed research journal Astrophysics and Space Science, describing a strange red rain that fell in India in 2001, shortly after a meteor airburst event in the area. The authors posit that the red particles found in the raindrops may be extraterrestrial microbes. The authors' last two papers on the subject were unpublished: this published paper is more cautious. The paper can be viewed online, and should obviously be considered in context. More info on the 'panspermia' hypothesis can be found at Wikipedia."

Comments

Contradicts Intelligence

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems this theory has gained some flack from the Intelligent Design community.

http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.p hp/id/849

"peer review" is not always peer review

[hde226868]

Although Astrophysics and Space Science is peer reviewed, you should be aware that this journal is not held in very high esteem by the astronomy and astrophysics community (contrary to, e.g., the Astrophysical Journal, Astronomy and Astrophysics, or the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society). If you don't believe me, take a look at the impact factor of the journal , which is 0.2, while it is greater than 4 for the renowed astronomical journals (the 2.1 for Astronomy and Astrophysics in the list cited is wrong, but the remaining impact factors for astronomical journals more or less scale with the journal's image in the community).

To understand how this article could be published, you should be aware that for all scientific journals the editor has the last responsibility for accepting a paper, not the peer reviewers. In the case of Astrophysics and Space Science, the editorial board contains N.C. Wickramasinghe, who is one of the inventors of the panspermia theory. So, even although peer reviews might have been dodgy, it could have been an editorial decision to accept this paper.

I happen to know that Astrophysics and Space Science operates this way, as a manuscript I co-reviewed with a PhD student of mine several years ago appeared in the journal without taking any of our recommendations into account. This has not happened to me with any of the 30odd manuscripts I have refereed since and is even more astonishing since the journal decided to print the original manuscript, without even addressing the large number of grammatical mistakes and spelling errors pointed out by us (which were so bad that we, as referees, could not understand what the authors were trying to say). I have declined to referee for Astrophysics and Space Science since and consider the journal a "scientific tabloid" as opposed to a "scientific broadsheet". And you wouldn't believe the "Sun" and the "News of the World" either, right?

So, to conclude, "peer refereed" does not always mean what you might think it does, and although I am not a microbiology specialist, as long as a report on the "red rain" is not accepted by a mainstream journal, would doubt any claims made in the article.