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What The Solar System Can Teach Us About Rocky Exoplanets
[astro-ph.EP] The number of rocky extrasolar planets being discovered continues to increase, but so too does the apparent diversity of such worlds. As we work to understand the likely bulk properties and thermal, geological, and climatological attributes we might expect of rocky exoplanets, we can look to the Solar System for guidance. Here, we review…
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Youngest Exoplanet Yet Discovered Found Hiding in Keck Observatory Data
[W.M.Keck Observatory] Astronomers have confirmed the youngest exoplanet detected so far, offering a rare glimpse…
Decoding The Weather On Brown Dwarf SIMP 0136
[Trinity College Dublin] Scientists from Trinity College Dublin have developed a powerful way to unravel…
Glycine In The Interstellar Medium Revisited: Resolving Conformational Complexity Kinetically
[astro-ph.GA] Numerous attempts to detect glycine, a simple amino acid and a key building block…
Earth As A Potential Source Of Llife For Europa’s Subsurface Ocean
The paper discusses the possibility of dust particles containing living bacteria ejected from Earth reaching Europa and landing on its surface. It is shown that, taking certain factors into account, over a period of 30 − 80 Myr (the estimated age of Europa’s ocean), Jupiter’s moon would have been impacted…
Keep readingDust To Dust: Prospects For Passive Technosignatures As Relics Of ETI
Technological societies are separated in time, not just space — that is the lesson of the Drake equation. Might the best way to seek them be to find technosignatures that persist long after their creators? I present work I and my collaborators have done on the idea of passive technosignatures,…
Keep readingExoplanets, -moons, -comets
Habitable Zones
Astronomy & Telescopes
Atmospheres, Climate, Weather
WINERED Detects a Strong Atmospheric Outflow on the Sub-Neptune GJ 3090b
[astro-ph.EP] Sub-Neptunes are the most common short-period (P<100 d) planets known. A major goal for the field is to build a comprehensive understanding of their compositions and evolutionary histories, and an important tool for achieving this goal is metastable helium (He∗) transmission spectroscopy, which traces atmospheric escape. In this paper, we report the detection of…
Read moreExploration Gear & Tech
Closed-loop In Situ Isolation Of Deep-sea Extremophiles Through Sensor-driven Microenvironment Preservation
[Nature Sensors] Deep sea microorganisms remain largely inaccessible because existing sampling and cultivation methods fail to preserve native high-pressure microenvironments from seafloor to laboratory. Here…
SkyFall Astrogeology/Astrobiology Droids Will Survey Mars
[NASA]. Equipped with four instruments each, the three SkyFall Mars helicopters helicopters will follow in the footsteps of the agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, a technology…
Alta-X Drone Tests Future Astrobiology / Astrogeology Droid Technology
[NASA]. An Alta-X drone flies an advanced guidance and navigation system known as the Safe and Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) experiment. The…
Imaging & Spectroscopy
High Water D/H Ratio of the Interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is Consistent With a Low-metallicity Origin
[astro-ph.EP] Recent JWST observations have revealed unusually high 12C/13C ratios in carbon-bearing molecules of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, consistent with formation in a lower-metallicity environment…
The Galactic Centre G+0.633-0.0604 Molecular Cloud: A New Astrochemical Gold Mine
[Astronomy and Astrophysics] Context. In the central molecular zone (CMZ) environment, shocks play a key role in both triggering star formation and providing chemical enrichment.…
How A Deep-sea Protein Adapts To An Extreme Environment
[Kyushu University] Life in the deep sea is under immense pressure—literally. Such extreme conditions can disrupt the delicate structures of proteins essential to life. Yet…
Biosignatures & Paleobiology
Deep Shifts In Evolutionary Rate Trajectories Of Ancient Bacterial Genes
[biorxiv.org] Reconstruction of ancestral gene repertoires from extant genomes captures only the genes that survived; those lost from the record are invisible. Among the genes…
Atmospheric Microbial Transport to Antarctica and Its Ecological Implications: A Systematic Review
[Environmental Microbiology] Atmospheric transport is hypothesized to be the primary vector connecting isolated Antarctic terrestrial habitats to global microbial pools, yet the mechanisms governing this…
The Epistemic Risk of the 31st Spore: If Planets Aren’t Fine Tuned, We’re Doing Life Detection Wrong
[physics.pop-ph] Exploration of planetary bodies within our solar system will be essential for understanding the origin of life on Earth and the distribution of life…