There is a radical idea that Earth was seeded not just with the building blocks of life but life itself.
During its flyby of Earth on 20 August, ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) found ingredients for life in Earth's atmosphere - the so-called ‘CHNOPS’ elements (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and sulphur).
A team of researchers has uncovered evidence of its origins in the atmosphere, where carbon dioxide bathed in ultraviolet sunlight reacted to form a mist of carbon molecules that rained onto the planet's surface.
The analysis is key to confirming carbon and nitrogen-rich dusts and organic compounds essential for life. However, the sample also revealed the presence of magnesium-sodium phosphate, which had not been detected before.
A new study aimed at answering the latter question finds that some building blocks didn’t need to have formed on Earth, but could have arrived from space.
Recently scientists have discovered one plausible pathway for how protocells may have first formed and chemically progressed to allow for a diversity of functions.
The research team investigated how the emergence of the first living systems from inert geological materials happened on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago.
The discovery of phosphorus in a molecular cloud at the edge of the Milky Way galaxy extends the presence of the element almost twice as far out as where it was known to exist.
Most of what we know about Enceladus and its ice-covered ocean comes from the Cassini mission. New research based on Cassini data strengthens the idea that Enceladus has the chemicals necessary for life.
Initial studies of the 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid Bennu sample collected in space and brought to Earth by NASA show evidence of high-carbon content and water.
Now, using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have found carbon on Europa’s surface, which likely originated in this ocean. The discovery signals a potentially habitable environment in the ocean of Europa.
U.S. scientists argue that chance alone cannot consistently produce the highly complex molecules found in all living creatures. To produce billions of copies of intricate objects like proteins, human hands, or iPhones, the universe needs a 'memory'.
According to the research, nature could have selected building blocks with useful properties before the Darwinian evolution.
An international team has analyzed samples taken from the asteroid Ryugu in 2018 by the Hayabusa2 mission and found uracil, one of the five key bases of the RNA and DNA molecules that are crucial to life as we know it.
In a molecular cloud called Chamaeleon I data from the telescope has revealed the presence of frozen carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur – elements vital to the formation of atmospheres and molecules.
