The origin of Earth's water is one of those foundational issues that explains our planet's habitability. The idea that water was delivered by comets and asteroids has been on the minds of planetary scientists for a long time. Both types…
A combination of advanced methods Materials provided by University of Konstanz. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. This Alien Planet Should Have Lost Its Atmosphere Billions of Years Ago A Routine Blood Test Could Predict Dementia Risk…
Comets may have been far less important to the origins of life on Earth than a long-standing theory suggests. New calculations indicate that delivering useful amounts of fragile, life-related molecules would have required an unusually lucky combination of events. Comets…
But Enceladus’s subsurface ocean is far more alkaline than Earth’s ocean, with a pH closer to that of baking soda or ammonia-based cleaners than to terrestrial seawater. Too, Enceladus’s ocean is low on dissolved carbon dioxide (CO2), an essential foodstuff for…
Published in Scientific Reports, the computational modelling study demonstrates that the extreme velocities and entry angles of cometary impacts would almost certainly vaporise fragile prebiotic molecules upon atmospheric entry or surface impact, making cometary delivery a “one-off fluke” rather than…
A new hypothesis paper proposes that abiotically generated polyols, rather than glycerol phosphates or glycolipids, served as the first membrane headgroups, with borate acting as an early molecular selector.
A new study led by the University of Cambridge challenges the long-standing idea that comets helped kick-start life on our home planet, suggesting that the icy bodies were largely unable to deliver the concentrated chemical ingredients needed for prebiotic chemistry.
Comets didn’t seed life on Earth after all, a new study suggests, potentially overturning a century-old idea. The theory that comets delivered the molecular building blocks for life on Earth is a long-standing one, since comets are known to carry…
The appearance of life on Earth is still a mystery. It's constrained by a few factors; for instance, the Earth had to have cooled before life could get started, and there had to be some liquid water, the right chemicals,…
(October 2015)What conditions are necessary for a planet to harbor life?Water, atmosphere, crust, distance from the star—as we consider changing each of these various conditions one by one, we begin to see how delicately balanced the current Earth…
How life began and whether it exists elsewhere: the origin of life, the last universal common ancestor, early life on Earth and biosignatures.
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