Earth's Atmosphere Harbors 'Alien' Life Forms, Scientists Say

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A group of students at the University of Houston conducted a study to see microbes high in the Earth's atmosphere. Using the instrument that looks like almost a small laundry hamper, they will fly a high-altitude experiment from Alaska between the distance of 18 kilometers and 50 kilometers from the ground to collect what is in the atmosphere.

In an article of Space.com, the so-called extremophiles are the prime mission of the group. The researchers would like to find out how these microbes reproduce in a high-altitude environment and could these types of microbes be found on other worlds?

Extremophiles are organisms that thrive in physically and geochemically extreme conditions that are detrimental to most life on earth. The most known extremophiles are the microbes which are organisms living inside hot rocks deep beneath the Earth's surface, in the summit of a mountain and some may live in both high and low pH environment.

According to Jaime Lehnen, a fourth-year student and one of the researchers said that the system that the research team possessed could be less open to contamination than pumps and other complicated mechanisms that require servicing on Earth. However, the only thing that concerns them is that the system is the first of its kind and they were not so sure how well it will function.

"A lot of times, these microbes when they go up, they shut down. They are not replicating and they are also not metabolically active. But, I am interested in how their stress response compared to those microbes found on Earth's surface", Lehnen explained.

However, per The Telegraph, the University of Sheffield and Buckingham University claimed to have found an evidence of microbes 16 miles up high above the Earth's surface between Chester and Wakefield. Scientists used a specialized balloon to gather samples in the stratosphere during the Perseid meteor shower that happened last August 11, 2016.

Scientists have found a fragment of a diatom, a single-cell alga that was first discovered in 1783 by Otto Friedrich Mϋller. This finding leaves scientist battling that this could be the evidence how life came to Earth many million years ago and that perhaps microbes are carried by meteorites from outer space to Earth.

"Most people will assume that these biological particles must have just drifted up in the stratosphere from Earth. But it is generally accepted that particle size found cannot be lifted up to heights", Mϋller said. "The only well-known exception is by a violent volcanic eruption, but none of which occurred within three years of the sample trip", he added.

Aside from these, NASA also announced that they too discovered bacteria living in the four to five miles above Earth's crust. Air samples taken in an aircraft flying in the troposphere revealed 314 different types of bacteria above the Atlantic Ocean and the US.

It is very interesting to discover such things that made the life on Earth. "Our conclusion then is that life is continually arriving at Earth from space, life is not restricted to this planet alone and most certainly did not originate here", Professor Milton Wainwright from the department of molecular biology and biotechnology at the University of Sheffield who also led the study, said.