The ESA has some good news and bad news for extraterrestrial enthusiasts. The good news is that a molecule thought to be a biomarker for life has been found in a comet and around a young star. The bad news is that the molecule isn’t the clear indicator of life that it was once believed to be.
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An international team of scientists has discovered evidence suggesting water ice may exist around the equator of Mars – a region in which it was believed the vital resource would be unable to survive.
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Fossils of the earliest lifeforms are relatively scant, but they did leave other traces of themselves behind. Now, paleontologists have discovered a set of tiny fossilized burrows, created by some of the earliest complex organisms more than half a billion years ago.
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One of the biggest biological mysteries is how life arose out of non-living molecules. To find out, a Georgia Tech team has recreated some of the conditions common to a pre-life Earth, and discovered that drying and rewetting the primordial soup lets key peptides form quickly and relatively easily.
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A new NASA study has poured another bucket of cold water on hopes of one day discovering life on the closest exoplanet ever discovered – the Earth-sized world Proxima b, which is thought to orbit in the habitable zone of the red dwarf Proxima Centauri.
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New types of bacteria have been found in one of the most alien environments on Earth: a subglacial lake buried beneath almost a thousand feet of ice. Conditions could be strikingly similar to oceans of Europa or Enceladus, so studying these organisms could aid the search for extraterrestrial life.
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One of the main goals of Curiosity was to determine if Mars has ever harbored life. The project has already discovered that Gale Crater was once an ancient lake, and now a team at Los Alamos has found “halos” in the bedrock, suggesting the area could have supported life long after the lake dried up.
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Back in February, NASA announced seven Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting the red dwarf TRAPPIST-1. The system is one of our best bets for finding life beyond Earth, and new research suggests that life could jump between the tightly-packed planets in a matter of decades.
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An international team of scientists has announced the discovery of a new “super-Earth” exoplanet that could represent our best chance of finding E.T. outside of our solar system.
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How did non-living matter transition into living organisms? A team is gently rocking a combination of key minerals and organic molecules to see if certain chemical reactions give birth to life. If life emerges “easily” from these conditions, it could be common throughout the universe.
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