Biosignatures -- evidence that says or suggests that life has once been present -- are often very hard to find and interpret. Scientists examining fossilized life on Earth can generally reach some sort of agreement about what is before them, but what about the soft-bodied or even single-celled organisms that were the sum total of …
Continue reading "“Agnostic Biosignatures,” And The Path To Life As We Don’t Know It"
The newest space telescope in the sky -- NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS -- has been searching for exoplanets for less than a year, but already it has quite a collection to its name. The TESS mission is to find relatively nearby planets orbiting bright and stable suns, and so expectations were high from …
Continue reading "Exoplanets Discoveries Flood in From TESS"
Did you know that many bacteria -- some of the oldest lifeforms on Earth -- can talk? Really. And not only between the same kind of single-cell bacteria, but back and forth with members of other species, too. Okay, they don't talk in words or with sounds at all. But they definitely communicate in …
Artist impression of the Hayabusa2 spacecraft touching down on asteroid Ryugu (JAXA / Akihiro Ikeshita) “1… 2… 3… 4…” The counting in the Hayabusa2 control room at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences (JAXA, ISAS) took on a rhythmic beat as everyone in the room took up the chant, their …
Continue reading "Hayabusa2 Snatches Second Asteroid Sample"
A vehicle that flies like a drone and will try to unravel some of the mysteries of Saturn's moon Titan was selected yesterday to be the next New Frontiers mission to explore the solar system. Searching for the building blocks of life, the Dragonfly mission will be able to fly multiple sorties to sample …
Continue reading "NASA Announces Astrobiology Mission to Titan"
The presence -- and absence -- of methane gas on Mars has been both very intriguing and very confusing for years. And news coming out last week and then on Monday adds to this scientific mystery. To the great surprise of the Curiosity rover team, their Sample Analysis on Mars instrument sent back a measurement …
Continue reading "Methane on Mars. Here Today, Gone Tomorrow"
The quest to find habitable -- and perhaps inhabited -- planets and moons beyond Earth focuses largely on their location in a solar system and the nature of its host star, the eccentricity of its orbit, its size and rockiness, and the chemical composition of its atmosphere, assuming that it has one. Astronomy, astrophysics, cosmochemistry …
Continue reading "The Interiors of Exoplanets May Well Hold the Key to Their Habitability"
For years now, finding planets in the habitable zones of their host stars has been a global astrophysical quest and something of a holy grail. That distance from a star where temperatures could allow H20 to remain liquid some of the time has been deemed the "Goldilocks" zone where life could potentially emerge and …
Continue reading "Exoplanets With Complex Life May Be Very Rare, Even in Their “Habitable Zones”"
Ethiopia's Dallol volcano and hot springs have created an environment about as hostile to life as can be imagined. Temperatures in the supersaturated water reach more than 200 degrees F (94 C) and are reported to approach pure acidity, with an extraordinarily low pH of 0.25. The environment is also highly salty, with salt chimneys …
Continue reading "The Message of Really, Really Extreme Life"
A look inside the planet simulator in the Origins of Life laboratory at McMaster University. Within this chamber, the origins of life can be explored on different worlds (McMaster University). Have you ever wondered if you could kick-start life on another planet? In the Origins of Life laboratory at McMaster University in Canada, there is …
Many Worlds 