Space

Thirty years ago, on Oct. 6, 1995, the very first exoplanet to be discovered around a sun-like star was revealed. Called 51 Pegasi b, it was a world like nothing we had ever seen before: a gas giant planet similar to Jupiter, but so close to its star that its year lasts just a little over four Earth days and its sky burns at 1,830 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius). The discovery of 51…

Mars hasn’t given us proof of life, but it has handed scientists a new kind of mystery. On the western edge of Jezero Crater, NASA’s Perseverance rover has been exploring Neretva Vallis, a river-carved valley that once fed a vast Martian lake. There, in an outcrop of ancient mudstone called the Bright Angel formation, the rover found one of its most intriguing targets yet: an…

Complex organic molecules that form part of the chain of chemical reactions that can result in life’s building blocks have been found in the watery geysers of Enceladus, almost twenty years after the plumes were first sampled by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Cassini’s mission to the ringed planet Saturn ended in 2017, but scientists are still making findings buried deep in its…

The Perseverance rover’s discovery of a potential biosignature found on a sedimentary rock on Mars is an exciting development in our search for life elsewhere in the universe, but how does it rank compared to other potential biosignatures that have previously been discovered on the Red Planet — and even beyond? “It’s arguably the best evidence that we have so far for microbial…