Space News & Blog Articles

The chemical is known as thiepine, or 2,5-cyclohexadiene-1-thione (C₆H₆S), a ring-shaped sulfur-bearing hydrocarbon produced in biochemical reactions. When examining the molecular cloud G+0.693–0.027, a star-forming region about 27,000 light-years from Earth near the center of the Milky Way, astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) and the CSIC-INTA Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) detected this complex molecule in space for the first time. This detection represents the largest sulfur-bearing molecule ever detected beyond Earth, with significant implications for the study of the cosmic origins of life.

The search for life-supporting worlds in the Solar System includes the Jovian moon Europa. Yes, it's an iceberg of a world, but underneath its frozen exterior lies a deep, salty ocean and a nickel-iron core. It's heated by tidal flexing, and that puts pressure on the interior ocean, sending water and salts to the surface. As things turn out, there's also evidence of ammonia-bearing compounds on the surface. All these things combine to provide a fascinating look at Europa's geology and potential as a haven for life.

We see stars as the main constituent of galaxies. They're the visible part, and they're what announce a galaxy's presence. But a galaxy's gas supply is its lifeblood, and tracing the gas as it flows in and through a galaxy reveals its inner workings.

Observations show that Jupiter's icy moon Europa has a thick icy shell covering a warm ocean. The ocean is chemically-rich, and may have all the essential ingredients for life. That's why Europa is such a juicy target in the search for life, and why NASA's Europa Clipper and the ESA's JUICE are on their way to examine the moon in greater detail.

The light, rare element boron, better known as the primary component of borax, a longtime household cleaner, was almost mined to exhaustion in parts of the old American West. But boron could arguably be an unsung hero in cosmic astrobiology, although it's still not listed as one of the key elements needed for the onset of life.

When the rover now named Perseverance landed in Jezero crater in early 2021, scientists already knew they had picked an interesting place to scope out. From space, they could see what looked like a bathtub ring around the crater, indicating there could once have been water there. But there was some debate about what exactly that meant, and it’s taken almost five years to settle it. A new paper from PhD student Alex Jones at Imperial College London and his co-authors has definitively settled the debate on the source of that feature - part of it was once a beach.