Outer space isn't the only place to meet alien life-forms. Cady is finding plenty of them here on Earth. Her close encounters at Yellowstone Park may be a preview of the extraterrestrial kind
E.T., You May Be Home Already
By Jeffrey Kluger
There are aliens living in the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park. Technically, the otherworldly creatures aren't all alive; many are just bacterial microfossils. They're not exactly extraterrestrials either, having spent their brief lives entirely on Earth. But if the tiny microbes prove anything, it's that living organisms can make their homes in the most unlikely places. For scientists like Sherry Cady, 43, a geologist at Portland State University in Oregon, this is big news indeed.
Cady is one of the leading lights in a brightening field known as astro- or exobiology—the study of how life could form elsewhere in the universe. In 1994 she made her first trip to Yellowstone to study the springs. Cady knew she might find heat-loving microbes in the scalding water, but she had no reason to think she would find remains of their deceased kin. When she looked at rock samples under a microscope, however, she discovered that they bore the fossilized imprints of bacterial sheets that gave silica a place to cling as the rocks were forming. "I was flabbergasted," she says.
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Name: Sherry Cady Age: 43 Why critics are taking note: Cady's a leading light in the field of astrobiology — the study of how life forms in the universe |
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Astropaleobiology
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