'Egg-shaped' globule could be 'evidence of life on Mars'

London, Apr 28 (ANI): An 'egg-shaped' object, which was found inside a Martian meteorite that fell to Earth last year, could be final proof of life on the Red Planet.

Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe has asserted that the globule from the rock named Tissint is rich in carbon and oxygen and insisted that they could only have been produced by living organisms.

He said that they could not have been caused by contamination when they fell to Earth.

"It is impossible to understand how carbon-rich particles of such uniform sizes and shapes got inside a rocky matrix if they are not relics of some algal species," the Sun quoted Prof Wickramasinghe, 72, who is famous for controversial ideas such as that the flu virus and even life itself was brought to our planet by comets, as saying.

"Tissint was collected weeks after it fell, and terrestrial contamination seems unlikely. In any case the structures we found were on newly fractured surfaces, from the interior of the meteorite."

The meteorite was named after the village where it came down in the Sahara desert in Morocco last July.

It was most likely blasted from Mars when it was hit by an asteroid millions of years ago.

A piece of it was examined at the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology and Cardiff University.

"All the indications are that structures such as we have found are evidence of life on Mars," PhD student Jamie Wallis, who was working with Dr Wickramasinghe, said.

"The spheres are probably remnants of polysaccharide shells surrounding algal type cells," Wallis added. (ANI)