May 2018

Iron-rich rocks near ancient lake sites on Mars could hold vital clues that show life once existed there, research suggests.

We explore the efficacy of machine learning (ML) in characterizing exoplanets into different classes. The source of the data used in this work is University of Puerto Rico's Planetary Habitability Laboratory's Exoplanets Catalog (PHL-EC).

An international team of scientists has created a tiny chemistry lab for a rover that will drill beneath the Martian surface looking for signs of past or present life.

Sixty-six million years ago, the world burned. An asteroid crashed to Earth with a force one million times larger than the largest atomic bomb, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Terrestrial Solar System planets either have high mean molecular weight atmospheres, as with Venus, Mars, and Earth, or no atmosphere at all, as with Mercury.

The emergence of life on the Earth has required a prior organic chemistry leading to the formation of prebiotic molecules. The origin and the evolution of the organic matter on the early Earth is not yet firmly understood.

By studying a stream on the UK coast, experts have calculated how much organic matter we might find on Mars, and where to look.

Scientists have created a new type of genetic replication system which demonstrates how the first life on Earth - in the form of RNA - could have replicated itself.

Aspects of an otherwise Earthlike planet's tilt and orbital dynamics can severely affect its potential habitability -- even triggering abrupt "snowball states" where oceans freeze and surface life is impossible, according to new research from astronomers at the University of Washington.

Even though it was not designed as an exoplanetary research mission, the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) has been opportunistically used for a novel experiment, in which Earth serves as a proxy exoplanet.

In this Letter, we make use of sophisticated 3D numerical simulations to assess the extent of atmospheric ion and photochemical losses from Mars over time.

Scientists re-examining data from an old mission bring new insights to the tantalizing question of whether Jupiter's moon Europa has the ingredients to support life.

A Multiverse - where our Universe is only one of many - might not be as inhospitable to life as previously thought, according to new research.

The hunt for life in these places, which are impossible to visit in person, will begin with a search for biological products in their atmospheres.

The habitable zone (HZ) is the circumstellar region where standing bodies of liquid water could exist on the surface of a rocky planet. Conventional definitions assume that CO2 and H2O are the only greenhouse gases.

A research duo from The University of Texas at Austin and UT Dallas have put forward a hypothesis that links the dawn of plate tectonics with "snowball Earth"--a period of climate change that sent the planet into a deep freeze that lasted millions of years.

All over the world, spectacular fossils have frequently been found preserved inside solid, roughly spherical rocks called "concretions."

Breakthrough Listen - the initiative to find signs of intelligent life in the universe - announced today that a survey of millions of stars located in the plane of our galaxy, using the CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope ("Parkes") in New South Wales, Australia, has commenced.

K2-18 is a nearby M2.5 dwarf, located at 34 pc and hosting a transiting planet which was first discovered by the K2 mission and later confirmed with Spitzer Space Telescope observations.

The two solar-like stars α Cen A and B have long served as cornerstones for stellar physics in virtue of their immediate proximity, association in a visual binary, and masses that bracket that of the Sun.

If you tilt a plant, it will alter its growth to bend back upwards. But how does it detect the inclination? With cellular clinometers: cells filled with microscopic grains of starch called statoliths.

The climate of early Mars is a subject of debate. While it has been thought that Mars had a warm and wet climate, like Earth, other researchers suggested early Mars might have been largely glaciated.

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered microbes living in a toxic volcanic lake that may rank as one of the harshest environments on Earth.