Astronomers have spotted barium in the atmosphere of a distant exoplanet. With its 56 protons, you have to run your…
Finding oxygen in an exoplanet's atmosphere is a clue that life may be at work. On Earth, photosynthetic organisms absorb…
When the James Webb Space Telescope aims at exoplanet atmospheres, it'll use spectroscopy to identify chemical elements. One of the…
Earth formed over 4.5 billion years ago via accretion. Earth's building blocks were chunks of rock of varying sizes. From…
Will we ever understand life's origins? Will we ever be able to put our finger on the exact moment and…
We know a ton about the inside of Earth. We know it has both an inner core and an outer…
Peptides are one of the smallest biomolecules and are one of life's critical building blocks. New research shows that they…
Carbon is critical to life, as far as we know. So anytime we detect a strong carbon signature somewhere like…
Without phosphorus, there's no life. It's a necessary part of DNA, RNA, and other biological molecules like ATP, which helps…
Author’s note – this article was written with Dr. Vincent Kofman, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), working in…