Life may not have begun with a dramatic lightning strike into the ocean but from many smaller "microlightning" exchanges among water droplets from crashing waterfalls or breaking waves.
Astrobiology
Mar 14, 2025
0
290
Searching for life on other celestial bodies, or at the very least the necessary components to support it, has been fascinating scientists and enthusiasts for centuries. While planets are the obvious choice, their moons can ...
Isolated by mountains along the East African Rift is Lake Tanganyika. More than 400 miles long, it is the continent's deepest lake and accounts for 16% of the world's available freshwater. Between 2 and 3 million years ago, ...
Astrobiology
Feb 19, 2025
0
491
More pocked with craters than any other object in our solar system, Jupiter's outermost and second-biggest Galilean moon, Callisto, appears geologically unremarkable. In the 1990s, however, NASA's Galileo spacecraft captured ...
Astrobiology
Feb 18, 2025
0
467
Thirty years after the discovery of the first exoplanet, astronomers have detected more than 7,000 of them in our galaxy. But there are still billions more to be discovered. At the same time, exoplanetologists have begun ...
Astrobiology
Jan 28, 2025
2
814
A team of astronomers has found that Venus has never been habitable, despite decades of speculation that our closest planetary neighbor was once much more like Earth than it is today.
Astrobiology
Dec 2, 2024
2
355
Panspermia is the hypothesis that life can survive the transfer between planetary bodies as a secondary path for life to get started on planets throughout a solar system. The discovery of extraterrestrial life on asteroids ...
The mystery of why life uses molecules with specific orientations has deepened with a discovery that RNA—a key molecule thought to have potentially held the instructions for life before DNA emerged—can favor making the building ...
Astrobiology
Nov 21, 2024
1
234
The chances of intelligent life emerging in our universe—and in any hypothetical ones beyond it—can be estimated by a new theoretical model which has echoes of the famous Drake Equation.
Astronomy
Nov 12, 2024
1
894
Evidence suggests Mars could very well have been teeming with life billions of years ago. Now cold, dry, and stripped of what was once a potentially protective magnetic field, the red planet is a kind of forensic scene for ...
Astrobiology
Oct 29, 2024
0
226
