For a billion years, single-celled eukaryotes ruled the planet. Then around 700 million years ago during Snowball Earth — a geologic era when glaciers may have stretched as far as […]
Much of what we know about Neptune’s moon Triton was inferred from the analysis of images returned by the Voyager 2 mission, the only spacecraft to have visited that putative […]
We’ve all seen the surreal footage in nature documentaries showing hydrothermal vents on the frigid ocean floor—bellowing black plumes of super-hot water—and the life forms that cling to them. Now, […]
The abyssal ocean covers more than half of the Earth’s surface, yet remains understudied and underappreciated. In this Perspectives article, we mark the occasion of the Deep Submergence Vehicle Alvin’s […]
On Earth, where there is liquid water, there is life. Jupiter’s moon Europa has a liquid water ocean underneath its icy crust.
Imagery from the solar-powered spacecraft shows some intriguing features on the ice-encased Jovian moon.
Astrobiology research seeks to understand how life begins and evolves, and to determine whether life exist elsewhere in the universe. The discovery of diverse ocean worlds has significantly expanded the […]
Recent reports of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope finding signs of life on a distant planet understandably sparked excitement. A new study challenges this finding, but also outlines how the […]
Over the course of its elliptical orbit, the moon Enceladus is squeezed unevenly by Saturn’s gravitational pull and deforms from a spherical shape into a football shape and back again. […]
The subsurface ocean of Europa is a high priority target in the search for extraterrestrial life, but direct investigations are hindered by the presence of a thick, exterior ice shell.
