Space and astronomy news
Does it feel like all eyes are on Venus these days? The discovery of the potential biomarker phosphine in the planet’s upper atmosphere last month garnered a lot of attention, as it should. There’s still some uncertainty around what the phosphine discovery means, though.
Now a team of researchers claims they’ve discovered the amino acid glycine in Venus’ atmosphere.
Continue reading “Astronomers Report They’ve Detected the Amino Acid Glycine in the Atmosphere of Venus”
The joint NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens mission revealed some amazing things about Saturn and its system of moons. In the thirteen years that it spent studying the system – before it plunged into Saturn’s atmosphere on September 15th, 2017 – it delivered the most compelling evidence to date of extra-terrestrial life. And years later, scientists are still poring over the data it gathered.
For instance, a team of German scientists recently examined data gathered by the Cassini orbiter around Enceladus’ southern polar region, where plume activity regularly sends jets of icy particles into space. What they found was evidence of organic signatures that could be the building blocks for amino acids, the very thing that life is made of! This latest evidence shows that life really could exist beneath Enceladus’ icy crust.
Continue reading “The Raw Materials for Amino Acids – Which are the Raw Materials for Life – Were Found in the Geysers Coming out of Enceladus”
The question of how life on Earth first emerged is one that humans have been asking themselves since time immemorial. While scientists are relatively confident about when it happened, there has been no definitive answer as to why it did. How did amino acids, the chemical building blocks of life, come together roughly four billion years ago to create the first protein molecules?
While that question is still unanswered, scientists are making new discoveries that could help narrow it down. For instance, a team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Center for Chemical Evolution (CCT) recently conducted a study that showed how some of the earliest predecessors of the protein molecule may have spontaneously linked up to form a chain.
Continue reading “All Life on Earth is Made up of the Same 20 Amino Acids. Scientist Now Think They Know Why”
The question of how life first emerged here on Earth is a mystery that continues to
One of the more daunting aspects of the mystery has to do with peptides and enzymes, which fall into something of a “chicken and egg” situation. Addressing this, a team of researchers from the University College London (UCL) recently conducted a study that effectively demonstrated that peptides could have formed in conditions
Evolution explains how life adapts and evolves over eons. But how did life originate? Chemists Miller and Urey put the raw chemicals of life into a solution, applied an electric charge, and created amino acids – the building blocks of life.
Continue reading “Astronomy Cast Ep. 376: The Miller-Urey Experiment”