[Dale Andersen]: The 787 Dreamliner rolled to a stop far out on the apron, as the big jets often do here, and I climbed down into a gray afternoon and […]
All News
Posted inAstrobiology (general)
Astrobiology Primer
[Current Biology (Cell)] Astrobiology aims not only to determine whether life exists beyond Earth but to understand how biology ‘fits’ into a physicochemical universe of stars and planets, including Earth […]
Posted inAstrobiology (general)
The Evolution Of Oxygen, Temperature, And Marine Aerobic Habitat For Animals Over The Last Billion Years Of Earth History
[Current Biology (Cell)] Atmospheric and ocean oxygen levels and temperature have changed considerably over Earth history, and many of these changes coincided with similarly dramatic changes in marine life.
Posted inWater/Hycean Worlds & Oceanography
Icy Ocean Planet Recon: Saildrone Research Fleet To Circle Antarctica For 5 Years
Editor’s note: As we plan to use robotic probes such as Saildrone to explore worlds in our solar system with oceans, missions that explore Earth’s oceans can serve as important […]
Posted inBiophysics
Water As We’ve Never Known It: Testing Water Beyond Earth-like Conditions
[UNLV] Water isn’t always as it seems. Under extreme conditions, such as those found on other planets, it has been discovered to change its atomic structure, giving it the means […]
Posted inMars
Microbial Methanogenesis on Mars: A Life Detection Target For An MLE-Type Mission And Future Human Exploration
[astro-ph.IM] Methane (CH4) is one of the most enigmatic and potentially consequential trace gases detected on Mars, having demonstrated apparent seasonality, localized plumes, or, depending on who you ask, never […]
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
Identifying Deformed Exoplanets With JWST And Ariel: A Target Selection Metric For Phase Curve Observations
[astro-ph.EP] The shape of an exoplanet encodes fundamental information about its internal structure. For close-in giant planets, strong stellar tidal forces induce measurable deformations that can be probed through high-precision […]
Posted inAstrochemistry
Robustness Of C/O And Mean Molecular Weight Under Disequilibrium Chemistry
[astro-ph.EP] Transmission spectroscopy increasingly reduces exoplanet spectra to derived compositional metrics, such as C/O, O/H, and mean molecular weight (MMW), but these quantities do not carry molecular abundance uncertainties in […]
Posted inSETI & Technosignatures
Millimetre/Sub-Millimetre SETI: Expanding The Radio Technosignature Parameter Space With ALMA2040
[astro-ph.IM] The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been largely concentrated at centimetre wavelengths, and in particular in the ‘water hole’ (1.42-1.66 GHz) range. The millimetre and sub-millimetre sky is, […]
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
A New Method For Constraining 3D Exoplanet Atmospheres: Application To WASP-94A b’s Panchromatic Spectrum
[astro-ph.EP] A growing number of transiting exoplanets exhibit spectroscopic evidence that their leading and trailing limbs differ. Interpreting these observations is now the limiting step.