![Left: Average ocean fraction, calculated assuming a seawater freezing point of −1.8°𝐶 for Cases 1 and 3 and 0°𝐶 for Case 2. White shows the ice, and blue ocean. Middle: The mean near-surface air temperatures. Shown within the black contours are the regions where these vary between above and below freezing over the course of a single Earth year. Right: The mean surface temperatures. Also shown within the black contours are the regions where these vary between above and below freezing over the course of a single Earth year: these regions are narrower than the air ‘perifreezing zone’.-- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Sea-Ice.png?resize=1200%2C720&ssl=1)
[astro-ph.EP] Water worlds with potential deep oceans are at the forefront of currently observable exoplanetary habitability.
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Posted inNomenclature, Systematics, Natural History
Viruses, Proviruses and Satellites from Asgard Archaea Enrichments Reveal Complex Microbial Interactions
[biorxiv.org] Asgard archaea are the closest known relatives of eukaryotes and are central to models of eukaryogenesis involving archaeal–bacterial symbiosis, yet the contribution of viruses remains unexplored.
Posted inMars
Mars Rover Curiosity’s Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) Calibration
[NASA]. NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), located on the turret at the end of the rover’s robotic arm, on September 7, […]
Posted inBiosignatures & Paleobiology
Carbon and Sulfur Isotopes of Microfossils and Pyrites from Neoarchean Cherts: Microbial Diversity in an Ancient Deep-Marine Environment
[Astrobiology (Journal) via PubMed] The 2.52 Ga Gamohaan Formation in South Africa offers critical insights into microbial ecosystems that inhabited deep-marine environments during the late Archean.
Posted inOrigin & Evolution of Life
Auroral Belts As Magnetically Localized Reactors For Prebiotic Chemistry On Early Earth
[Biosystems] Most models of prebiotic chemistry emphasize globally distributed or widely acting energy sources, including ultraviolet radiation, lightning, impacts, and energetic particles.
Posted inIcy Worlds
SwRI Simulations Indicate That Large Impacts May Limit Ocean Formation In Icy Moons
[SwRI] Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists provided simulations to understand the role disruptive impacts play on icy moons with subsurface oceans in our solar system.
Posted inAstrogeology
Trans-Neptunian Objects Remember Their Past
[NASA]. For the first time, scientists used the joint power of NASA’s Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes to study some of the most far-flung bodies in our solar system, […]
![RMS vs bin-size of the residuals from our TTV fits (see Section 4.1). The four panels show the 2x2 different reduction-likelihood pairings considered in this work. The two jitter treatments find binning behavior worse than that expected from pure Gaussian noise (dashed line), and instead have a slope of ∼ − 1/3, similar to other NIRSpec PRISM results (e.g. Kipping et al. 2025). The inclusion of a GP to absorb time-correlated noise greatly reduces the slopes, as again expected.-- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/JWST-Excludes.png?resize=1200%2C720&ssl=1)
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
JWST Excludes Exomoons Down to 0.1 Earth Radii Around a Rocky, Temperate Exoplanet
[astro-ph.EP] To date, even with JWST, it has not been possible to test for exomoons as small as the Moon. Only two reported searches for exomoons around bound planets have […]
Posted inTitan
NASA Administrator Visits Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS)
[NASA]. Dragonfly will explore sites of interest around Titan’s equatorial regions and collect samples of surface material for analysis inside DraMS, the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer.
Posted inNanotechnology & SynBio
Advances in Machine Learning for Directed Evolution: A Five-Year Retrospective
[q-bio.BM] The last five-plus years have seen many protein engineering disciplines transformed by advances in machine learning (ML), but the same cannot be said for directed evolution.