While it has been long supposed that asteroids played a role in the delivery of important prebiotic compounds to early Earth, the exact nature of the interactions between asteroidal material […]
The asteroid that struck the Earth 66 million years ago devastated life across the planet, wiping out the dinosaurs and other organisms in a hail of fire and catastrophic climate […]
A long-standing idea in planetary science is that water-rich meteorites arriving late in Earth’s history could have delivered a major share of Earth’s water. A new study by Universities Space […]
The next great leap in Martian exploration will be the return of samples to Earth. To ensure the maximum scientific return from studying these samples, the development and utilisation of […]
Both abiotic self-organization and biological mechanisms have been put forward as the origin of a number of geological patterns.
Life demonstrates remarkable homochirality of its major building blocks: nucleic acids, amino acids, sugars, and phospholipids. We propose a mechanism that places the root of life homochirality in the formation […]
The first bodies to form in the Solar System acquired their materials from stars, the presolar molecular cloud and the protoplanetary disk.
Nitrogen-containing organic compounds play key biological roles, and their identification in primitive astromaterials such as meteorites can shed light on the origin of life.
A key question in astronomy is how ubiquitous Earth-like rocky planets are. The formation of terrestrial planets in our solar system was strongly influenced by the radioactive decay heat of […]
![a) Mn/Na vs. Mn/Mg and b) Mn/Na vs. K/Li ratios among planetary bodies. The coloured curves denote the evolution of the composition of an evaporation residue calculated using eq. 35 at 1100 K (purple), 1500 K (blue), 2000 K (green) and 2500 K (red) at a fixed relative oxygen fugacity (∆IW-1, except for 1100 K, which was calculated at ∆IW-6, see text), with numbers denoting the fraction of Mn loss undergone by the body. The black dashed lines connect equal degrees of Mn loss at different temperatures. The solid black curves trace a binary mixture of a volatile-depleted end-member with 90 % Mn loss and a CI-like end-member. The small numbers denote the mass fraction of CI in the mixture. On a), only the volatile-depleted end-member at 1500 K is shown due to clarity, whereas in b) the end-members are taken at the three temperatures, and the dotted grey lines connect equal fractions of CI material. The grey point gives the composition of the Earth assuming 50 % of its Mn budget resides in the core [see Siebert et al., 2018]. The grey field denotes the compositional range of chondrites [Wasson and Kallemeyn, 1988; Siebert et al., 2018]. -- astro-ph.EP](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Physicochemical-Controls-On-The.png?resize=1200%2C718&ssl=1)
Despite the fact that the terrestrial planets formed from the protoplanetary disk, their compositions show marked departures from that of solar nebula condensates.
