.. and a red comet …

There is an image of a red comet at www.dailygalaxy.com September 1st, being Comet Sidling Spring, which is named after the Australian observatory where it was first seen in 2007. It was visible in binoculars until January of this year (2010) and the post goes on to describe the idea of panspermia – the seeding of life by comets. Life on earth seems to have appeared soon after the termination of a massive bombardment event at around 3.8 billion years ago (so it is said). Might comets and meteorites have delivered the compounds essential for life to kickstart. The Cardiff team led by Wickramasinghe proposed a controversial theory and that is that radioactive elements can keep water in liquid form in comet interiors for millions of years making them ideal incubators in deep space – and recent comet missions such as Deep Impact and Stardust strengthen the argument – so we can look forwards to more on this issue.