Related papers: Cometary panspermia explains the red rain of Keral…
A red rain phenomenon occurred in Kerala, India starting from 25th July 2001, in which the rainwater appeared coloured in various localized places that are spread over a few hundred kilometers in Kerala. Maximum cases were reported during…
This paper reports the extraordinary biology of the microorganisms from the mysterious red rain of Kerala, India. These chemosynthetic organisms grow optimally at an extreme high temperature of 300 degrees C in hydrothermal conditions and…
We have shown that the red cells found in the Red Rain (which fell on Kerala, India, in 2001) survive and grow after incubation for periods of up to two hours at 121 oC . Under these conditions daughter cells appear within the original…
We report the discovery for the first time of diatom frustules in a carbonaceous meteorite that fell in the North Central Province of Sri Lanka on 29 December 2012. Contamination is excluded by the circumstance that the elemental abundances…
Floods have repeatedly battered the South Indian state, Kerala, as a result of the unprecedented heavy rainfall during Boreal Summers, in recent years. The state witnessed large departures from normal rainfall in 2018 and 2019. Previous…
Optical and near-IR observations of the halos of disk galaxies and blue compact galaxies have revealed a very red spectral energy distribution, which cannot easily be reconciled with a normal, metal-poor stellar population like that in the…
Red quasars are very red in the optical through near-infrared (NIR) wavelengths, which is possibly due to dust extinction in their host galaxies as expected in a scenario in which red quasars are an intermediate population between…
Rainfall in Kerala State, the southern part of Indian Peninsula in particular is caused by the two monsoons and the two cyclones every year. In general, climate and rainfall are highly nonlinear phenomena in nature giving rise to what is…
Kerala, the south-west coastal state of India, was ravaged by a series of floods during the South-West Monsoon of 2018. The season was marked by severely anomalous rainfall trends, with upto 150 mm of departures from the mean daily…
Binary stars are places of complex stellar interactions. While all binaries are in principle converging towards a state of circularization, many eccentric systems are found even in advanced stellar phases. In this work we discuss the sample…
The structures of the outer atmospheres of red giants are very complex. The notion of large optically thick molecular spheres around the stars (MOLspheres) has been invoked in order to explain e.g. spectro-interferometric observations.…
The large observed redshift of quasars has suggested large cosmological distances and a corresponding enormous energy output to explain the brightness or luminosity as seen at earth. Alternative or complementary sources of redshift have not…
Recent studies have suggested that red quasars are a phase in quasar evolution when feedback from black hole accretion evacuates obscuring gas from the nucleus of the host galaxy. Here, we report a direct link between dust-reddening and…
Long-term $JHK$ light curves have recently become available for large numbers of the more luminous stars in the SMC. We have used these $JHK$ light curves, along with OGLE $V$ and $I$ light curves, to examine the variability of a sample of…
The origin of the broad emission line region (BELR) in quasars and active galactic nuclei is still unclear. I propose that condensations form in the warm, radiation pressure driven, accretion disk wind of quasars creating the BEL clouds and…
There exists a number of astronomical spectral phenomena that have remained unidentified after decades of extensive observations. The diffuse interstellar bands, the 220 nm feature, unidentified infrared emission bands, extended red…
We have cross-correlated the SDSS DR3 Schneider et al. (2005) quasar catalog with the XMM-Newton archive. Color and redshift selections (g - r > 0.5 and 0.9 z < 2.1) result in a sample of 17 red, moderate redshift quasars. The redshift…
I hypothesize a physical explanation for the "Little Red Dots" (LRDs) discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The first star formation in the universe occurs in dense clusters, some of which may undergo runaway collapse and…
The Indian monsoon, a multi-variable process causing heavy rains during June-September every year, is very heterogeneous in space and time. We study the relationship between rainfall and Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR, convective cloud…
We carried out high-sensitivity spectropolarimetric observations of the central star of the Red Rectangle proto-planetary nebula with the aim of constraining the mechanism that gives its biconical shape. The stellar light of the central…