Godfrey Louis is a solid-state physicist from India. His hypotheses about the "red rain" phenomenon in Kerala have attracted controversy. In April 2008, he published a paper in which he hypothesised that samples of particles from the "blood-coloured" rain that fell in his state of Kerala, India in the summer of 2001 were the result of a comet disintegrating in the upper atmosphere which comprised mainly microbes from outer space.[1] The paper drew much media interest. Other scientists disagreed early on with Louis' hypothesis regarding the red rain's origin.[2] An earlier (2001) study by the Centre for Earth Science Studies, Kerala, India, reported that the red rain was the result of spores from local algae.[3]
Since October 2006 Louis has been at Department of Physics, Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT) in Kochi, Kerala.
In August 2010 Louis and his collaborators presented a paper at the SPIE astrobiology conference held in San Diego, USA, claiming that the red rain cells develop internal daughter cells and multiply when exposed to extreme temperature of 121 °C in an autoclave for two hours, and that the fluorescent behavior of the red cells is similar to the extended red emission observed in the Red Rectangle nebula.[4]