A new study has found that humans exhibit an aura that can be visualized but is more scientific in nature than spiritual.
This aura, invisible to the naked eye, is present around human bodies and could be cleaning the air we breathe. The study, published in the journal Science, has found that a haze of air-cleansing molecules is formed by the human body when ozone in the air comes in contact with the oil in our skin.
The air-cleansing molecules are nothing but transient OH radicals. The OH radicals have previously been known for neutralizing toxic molecules in the presence of sunlight that produced it. This has earned them the moniker “detergents of the atmosphere.”
The new study confirms the presence of OH radicals, which are being made by our human bodies. This is a first in the scientific field. However, experts are not sure whether the aura, technically called the oxidation field, is good or bad because of a lack of studies on the subject.
“[The field] may be cleaning the air before I breathe in, but we don’t know,” Prof Jonathan Williams, of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, and the lead author of the study, told The Telegraph.
“The other possibility, which is more concerning, is perhaps a compound which is considered to be harmless could become more toxic than its precursor when it’s oxidized in the OH field. Now we’ve discovered this, more research has to be done,” he added.
The presence of an aura around the human body is an ancient idea. There is a lot of talk about it in spiritual circles. This aura is in stark contrast to the one discovered by the scientists and is not to be confused with the one talked about in the study.
The oxidation field was realized using scientific methods. Professor Williams and his team conducted their experiment by putting four people in a sterile room with oxygen masks on and then measuring the level of OH radicals in the air.
Next, they added ozone to the air in the room and saw a significant surge in the chemical levels. The team visualized images from the data showing the oxidation fields.
On closer analysis, the source of OH radicals was found to be a compound called squalene. This compound, known to keep skin supple, was found to interact with ozone and produce the OH oxidation field through a sequence of complex chemical reactions.
The chemical outline, Prof. Williams said, is akin to the glow of green-colored radiation around a container of nuclear waste shown in a cartoon.
“When I’m breathing in there is chemistry is going on, which is changing emissions from the sofa I am sitting on into other compounds,” Prof. Williams said. “We simply do not know whether those compounds are more or less harmful than the sofa’s emissions themselves.
“There’s an immediate health implication [to this research]. We need to study them rather than just measuring what a sofa emits. We need to measure what a sofa and a person make together as the interaction of the emissions with our field is more important.”
Scientists hope to recreate this aura in other animals specifically dogs.
