Space News & Blog Articles

When researchers look up at the sky and wonder if we’re not alone, they also realize the origins of life here on Earth might hold the key to finding out. The chaotic chemical soup of our early world eventually led to the staggering complexity of modern life, but how exactly did it start? Proteins were one of the key ingredients in the early years, but we’re still only just discovering how these marvels of modern biology first managed to fold, function, and survive. A new review paper, The borderlands of foldability: lessons from simplified proteins, published recently in Trends in Chemistry, showcases how scientists are attempting to answer this question - by researching “simplified proteins”.

The Universe is an unfathomably large and ancient place. It began with a giant explosion roughly 14 billion years ago (the Big Bang) and has been in a state of expansion ever since. Based on current estimates, there are more than 2 trillion galaxies in the "observable Universe," some with as many as a trillion stars each. Within our galaxy alone, there are between 100 and 400 billion stars and 100 to 160 billion planets. And according to every bit of scientific evidence available, the ingredients for life are everything in abundance.

Here's a sobering thought. Right now, there are asteroids and comets in our Solar System that could pose a genuine threat to Earth and we usually can't see them. Some are as dark as coal while others hide in the glare of the Sun where our telescopes simply can't look. A few are small enough to slip past our detection systems entirely and this is the problem NASA's NEO (Near Earth Objects) Surveyor has been designed, from the ground up, to solve.

Stars are the basic units of a galaxy. But they form from gas, which is even more elemental. How star-forming gas moves around in a galaxy shapes star formation, and also shapes the galaxy and how it evolves.

For years, when something happened on the far side of the Sun, it was invisible to us on Earth. Sunspots could form there, flares could lash out and the corona could send masses of material out to space. However, we didn't know about any of this until those active regions rotated around to our view. In the late 1900s, scientists came up with a technique called helioseismology to analyze sound waves influenced by such activity as they echoed through the Sun.