Trying to piece together the appearance of life on Earth is a little like looking through a kaleidoscope. There are competing theories for where Earth's water came from, and there's incomplete evidence for how the moon formed ...
To understand how life emerged, scientists investigate the chemistry of carbon and water. In the case of water, they track the various forms, or isotopes, of its constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms over the history of the ...
A new study led by University of Wisconsin Oshkosh geologist Timothy Paulsen and Michigan Tech geologist Chad Deering advances the understanding of the role that continents have played in the chemical evolution of Earth's ...
When did the Earth reach oxygen levels sufficient to support animal life? Researchers from McGill University have discovered that a rise in oxygen levels occurred in step with the evolution and expansion of complex, eukaryotic ...
The discovery of more than 4,500 extra-solar planets has created a need for modelling their interior structure and dynamics. As it turns out, iron plays a key role.
Astronomers have managed to link the properties of the inner planets of our solar system with our cosmic history: with the emergence of ring structures in the swirling disk of gas and dust in which these planets were formed. ...
Earth and Mars were formed from material that largely originated in the inner solar system; only a few percent of the building blocks of these two planets originated beyond Jupiter's orbit. A group of researchers led by the ...
Earth's surface environment hosts large reservoirs of hydrogen (H, mainly in the form of water, H2O), nitrogen (in atmospheric N2) and carbon (mainly in carbonate rocks). H, N and C are sometimes called "volatile" elements, ...
In a new study, published in the journal Nature, the researchers show that the planet, which is 31 light years from Earth, is one of the lightest among the nearly 5,000 exoplanets (planets outside our own solar system) that ...
By performing a series of real and 'fake' flybys, ESA's Mars Express has revealed how Mars' largest moon, Phobos, interacts with the solar wind of charged particles thrown out by the Sun—and spotted an elusive process that ...
