Entropy Could be Key to a Planet’s Habitability Jan. 10, 2024 We all know that to have life on a world, you need three critical items: water, warmth, and food. Now add to that a factor called “entropy.” It plays a role in determining if a given planet can sustain and grow complex life. Read more Image
Webb Finds Icy Complex Organic Molecules around Protostars Jan. 9, 2024 In the quest to understand how and where life might arise in the galaxy, astronomers search for its building blocks. Complex Organic Molecules (COMs) are some of those blocks. Read more Image
Curiosity Rover Finds New Evidence of Ancient Mars Rivers, a Key Signal for Life Dec. 14, 2023 New analysis of data from the Curiosity rover reveals that much of the craters on Mars today could have once been habitable rivers. Read more Image
Looking at Connections between Archaea and Eukarya Dec. 13, 2023 A study is helping scientists better understand the history of genome organization and how such systems have evolved through time following the origins of life on Earth. Read more Image
Synthesizing Nucleic Acids before the Emergence of Life Dec. 12, 2023 A team of NASA-supported scientists have provided new information on how one class of biomolecule, nucleic acids, could have formed outside of living cells with the help of naturally occurring minerals in the environment before life’s emergence on Earth. Read more Image
Impact Experiments Probe the Origin of Organics on the Dwarf Planet Ceres Dec. 11, 2023 One of the most exciting findings from NASA’s Dawn mission is that Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter, hosts complex organics. Read more Image
Digging Deeper to Find Life on Ocean Worlds Dec. 8, 2023 “Follow the water” has been the mantra of the astrobiology community in search of alien life in the universe. Water is a fundamental building block of all terrestrial life as we know it and is abundant throughout the solar system, and perhaps, the universe. Read more Image
The Case of the Missing Phosphorus: Astronomers Find Life Ingredient at Galaxy’s Edges Dec. 7, 2023 The discovery of phosphorus in a molecular cloud at the edge of the Milky Way galaxy challenges current views of how the element originates and extends the galactic habitable zone. Read more Image
Saturn’s Icy Moon May Hold the Building Blocks of Life Dec. 6, 2023 As astrophysics technology and research continue to advance, one question persists: is there life elsewhere in the universe? Read more Image
The Combination of Oxygen and Methane Could Reveal the Presence of Life on Another World Nov. 30, 2023 In searching for life in the universe, a field known as astrobiology, scientists rely on Earth as a template for biological and evolutionary processes. Read more Image