Astronomy
The hunt for Earth-like planets, and perhaps extraterrestrial life, just got more precise, thanks to record-setting starlight measurements made possible by a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) "astrocomb."
Habitable Zones & Global Climate
A major volcanic event could have triggered one of the largest glaciations in Earth's history - the Gaskiers glaciation, which turned the Earth into a giant snowball approximately 580 million years ago.
Biosignatures & Paleobiology
Dutch scientists have developed an instrument capable of detecting the presence of living plants kilometres away.
Habitable Zones & Global Climate
How good is our universe at making habitable planets? The answer to this depends on which factors are important for life: Does a planet need to be Earth mass? Does it need to be inside the temperate zone?
Biosignatures & Paleobiology
With the number of confirmed rocky exoplanets increasing steadily, their characterisation and the search for exoplanetary biospheres is becoming an increasingly urgent issue in astrobiology.
Planetary Protection
We report our proposal for the establishment of a biocontainment and astrobiology laboratory in a strategic area of Pieve a Nievole (PT) at 28 mt above sea level - to face the lack of biological and astrobiological research centers and all the social, economic and cultural consequences that this project implicate.
Astrochemistry
In the laboratory, the photo-and thermochemical evolution of ices, made of simple molecules of astrophysical relevance, always leads to the formation of semi-refractory water-soluble organic residues.
Habitable Zones & Global Climate
We report improved masses, radii, and densities for four planets in two bright M-dwarf systems, K2-3 and GJ3470, derived from a combination of new radial velocity and transit observations. Supplementing K2 photometry with follow-up Spitzer transit observations refined the transit ephemerides of K2-3 b, c, and d by over a factor of 10.
Titan
The Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS) Electron Spectrometer (ELS) instrument onboard Cassini revealed an unexpected abundance of negative ions above 950 km in Titan's ionosphere.
Meteorites, Asteroids, & Comets
An international study led by researchers from the Institute of Space Sciences, from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Institut d'Estudis Espacials de Catalunya has discovered that carbonaceous chondrites, a class of meteorites, incorporated hydrated minerals along with organic material from the protoplanetary disk before the formation of planets.
SETI
The detection of laser radiation originating from space is a positive indicator of Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (ETI).
Recent Releases
Recent Status Reports