extraterrestrial life – Quanta Magazine

These Moons Are Dark and Frozen. So How Can They Have Oceans?

Robin George Andrews — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 14:49:29 +0000

For most of humankind’s existence, Earth was the only known ocean-draped world, seemingly unlike any other cosmic isle. But in 1979, NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft flew by Jupiter. Its moon Europa, a frozen realm, was decorated with grooves and fractures — hints that there might be something dynamic beneath its surface. “After Voyager, people suspected that Europa was weird and might have an ocean,”...

Source

Underground Cells Make ‘Dark Oxygen’ Without Light

Saugat Bolakhe — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 13:49:44 +0000

Scientists have come to realize that in the soil and rocks beneath our feet there lies a vast biosphere with a global volume nearly twice that of all the world’s oceans. Little is known about these underground organisms, who represent most of the planet’s microbial mass and whose diversity may exceed that of surface-dwelling life forms. Their existence comes with a great puzzle: Researchers have...

Source

An Explorer of Abyssal Depths Looks to Oceans on Other Worlds

Steve Nadis — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 14:04:43 +0000

As a boy growing up in Rochester, England, Chris German knew of his family’s strong maritime tradition, and he had no intention of continuing it. One of his grandfathers had served in the Royal Navy for much of his life, while the other had worked in the Chatham Naval Dockyard, as did German’s father and two uncles. Yet even though German attended a school founded in 1708 to train future ocean...

Source

Inside Ancient Asteroids, Gamma Rays Made Building Blocks of Life

John Rennie and Allison Parshall — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 15:28:36 +0000

In 2021, the Hayabusa2 space mission successfully delivered a morsel of the asteroid 162173 Ryugu to Earth — five grams of the oldest, most pristine matter left over from the solar system’s formation 4.5 billion years ago. Last spring, scientists revealed that the chemical composition of the asteroid includes 10 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The discovery added to the evidence that...

Source

Life Helps Make Almost Half of All Minerals on Earth

Joanna Thompson — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 14:00:50 +0000

The impact of Earth’s geology on life is easy to see, with organisms adapting to environments as different as deserts, mountains, forests and oceans. The full impact of life on geology, however, can be easy to miss. A comprehensive new survey of our planet’s minerals now corrects that omission. Among its findings is evidence that about half of all mineral diversity is the direct or indirect result...

Source