News
The Sun's Red Dwarf Neighbors Provide Clues to Origins of Carbon and Oxygen
4+ hour, 25+ min ago (288+ words) We live near a fusion reactor in space that provides all our heat and light. That reactor is also responsible for the creation of various elements heavier than hydrogen, and that's true of all stars. So, how do we know…...
It Didn't Take Long For Earth's Ancient Oceans To Become Oxygenated
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (539+ words) Earth's story is replete with destiny-changing events, and the GOE is definitely one of them. Why? Because oxygen allowed aerobic respiration, and aerobic respiration generates way more energy from the same amount of food than anaerobic respiration without oxygen. Once…...
Forget Stardust - It Was Star-Ice All Along
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (290+ words) The key to the paper is Zirconium - not an element typically associated with cosmochemistry. However, it has one particular isotope - Zr-96 - that is only created in supernovae. So Dr. Bizzarro and his team decided to look for evidence of it…...
Did Life Begin in Prebiotic Surface Gels?
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (760+ words) [Could life on Earth have begun in surface-bound gels that predated the first cells? Credit: ChemSystemChem/Khanum, et al. (2025)]Surface-bound gels may have provided the structure and chemistry necessary for life to take root on Earth. These findings could also…...
When Ancient Scribes Accidentally Became Scientists
1+ mon, 2+ week ago (249+ words) The eclipse record itself, preserved in the "Spring and Autumn Annals," represents perhaps the earliest datable account of a total solar eclipse. But when researchers tried to verify it using modern astronomical calculations, they hit a problem. The math said…...
Helium Streams Observed on Super-Puff Exoplanet
1+ mon, 2+ week ago (138+ words) What new insight into atmospheric escape and exoplanet leaking helium will researchers make in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science! Nature Astronomy - Continuous helium absorption from both the leading and trailing…...
The life-giving secret of protoplanetary disks? Dust.
1+ mon, 3+ week ago (490+ words) The complex molecules required for life on Earth might never have formed if it wasn't for cosmic dust. That's the conclusion of a new study by researchers from Friedrich Schiller University, the University of Virginia, and Heriot-Watt University. The earliest…...
Water Retention on Earth-Like Planets Around Variable Stars
1+ mon, 3+ week ago (200+ words) In the end, the researchers found that the nine stars in this study demonstrate very little influence on the equilibrium temperature of their exoplanets. Additionally, the team found that exoplanets orbiting within the inner edge of their star's habitable zone…...
Some Exoplanets Can Create Their Own Water Through Crust-Atmosphere Reactions
2+ mon, 3+ day ago (471+ words) Without water, life is highly unlikely, as far as scientists understand it. The entire idea of a habitable zone around other stars is based on a planet's potential to have liquid water on its surface. But where does this water…...
Life Might Show Up As Pink And Yellow Clouds On Distant Worlds
2+ mon, 1+ week ago (185+ words) That is a pretty significant amount of colonization - and nowhere near the level we have on Earth. So, while the paper proves that, at least in theory, we would be able to directly detect the spectral signatures of these microbes…...