In search for alien life, purple may be the new green

From house plants and gardens to fields and forests, green is the color we most associate with surface life on Earth, where conditions favored the evolution of organisms that perform oxygen-producing photosynthesis using ...

If Hycean worlds really exist, what are their oceans like?

Astronomers have been on the hunt for a new kind of exoplanet in recent years—one especially suited for habitability. They're called Hycean worlds, and they're characterized by vast liquid water oceans and thick hydrogen-rich ...

New ultra-short-period exoplanet discovered

Using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers have detected a new ultra-short-period exoplanet. The newly found alien world is nearly two times larger than the Earth and orbits its host star in less ...

Early life was radically different than today

All modern life shares a robust, hardy, efficient system of intertwined chemicals that propagate themselves. This system must have emerged from a simpler, less efficient, more delicate one. But what was that system, and why ...

Big planets don't necessarily mean big moons

Does the size of an exomoon help determine if life could form on an exoplanet it's orbiting? This is something a February 2022 study published in Nature Communications hoped to address as a team of researchers investigated ...

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