Godfrey Louis

Dr. Godfrey Louis is a solid-state physicist, who, while at Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam achieved notoriety for his controversial hypotheses about the red rain in Kerala. In April 2006, he published a paper. in the journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesized that samples of solids from the "blood-colored" rain collected in his state of Kerala, India in the summer of 2001 contain microbes from outer space. The hypothesis was that red rain was an outcome of a meteor passing by.

Since October 2006 he has been at Department of Physics, Cochin University of Science and Technology(CUSAT) in Kochi, Kerala.

A new department of Astrobiology

The Tribune reported, on the 2nd June 2006, that a new department of Astrobiology could be established at Mahatma Gandhi University. Dr James, the vice-chancellor, said the university had set up a laboratory exclusively for studies in astrobiology and it had the potential to rise to the level of a centre for astrobiology in future. This was in large part as a result of the study of the red rain in Kerala by Dr Louis and the endorsement that his work had received from Chandra Wickramasinghe. As of June 2008, there is no such department at Mahatma Gandhi University at Kottayam

See also

• Red Rain in Kerala
• Panspermia

External links

• Home Page of Dr. Godfrey Louis
• The Red Rain Phenomenon of Kerala and its Possible Extraterrestrial Origin in Astrophysics and Space Science
• Popular Science – Is It Raining Aliens?
• arXiv astrophysics – Use the search facility with 'Godfrey Louis' to locate his three papers.
• Tribune 2 June 2006 – Tribune article
• Horizon, 14 November 2006