Lifeboat Foundation

For decades, science fiction authors have imagined scenarios in which life thrives on the harsh surfaces of Mars or our moon, or in the oceans below the icy surfaces of Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s moon Europa. But the study of habitability—the conditions required to support and sustain life—is not just confined to the pages of fiction. As more planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond are investigated for their potential to host conditions favorable to life, researchers are debating how to characterize habitability.

While many studies have focused on the information obtained by orbiting spacecraft or telescopes that provide snapshot views of ocean worlds and exoplanets, a new paper emphasizes the importance of investigating complex geophysical factors that can be used to predict the long-term maintenance of life. These factors include how energy and nutrients flow throughout the planet.

“Time is a crucial factor in characterizing habitability,” says Mark Simons, John W. and Herberta M. Miles Professor of Geophysics at Caltech. “You need time for evolution to happen. To be habitable for a millisecond or a year is not enough. But if habitable conditions are sustained for a million years, or a billion…? Understanding a planet’s habitability takes a nuanced perspective that requires astrobiologists and geophysicists to talk to each other.”

“We think that the HD 144,432 disk may be very similar to the early Solar System that provided lots of iron to the rocky planets we know today,” said Dr. Roy van Boekel.

How did our solar system form and is this process similar in other solar systems throughout the universe? This is what a study published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics hopes to figure out as a team of international researchers used data from the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) to analyze the protoplanetary disk around HD 144,432, which is a young star located approximately 500 light-years from Earth. This study holds the potential to not only help researchers better understand the formation and evolution of solar systems, but also gain greater insight into how life could evolve in these systems, as well.

“When studying the dust distribution in the disk’s innermost region, we detected for the first time a complex structure in which dust piles up in three concentric rings in such an environment,” said Dr. Roy van Boekel, who is a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) and one of more than three dozen co-authors on the study. “That region corresponds to the zone where the rocky planets formed in the Solar System.”

Continue reading “Complex Ring System Around Young Star Resembles Early Solar System Formation” »

Darwin applied the theory of evolution to life on earth, but not to other massively complex systems like planets, stars, atoms and minerals. Now, an interdisciplinary group of researchers has identified a missing aspect of that theory that applies to essentially everything.

Their paper, “On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems,” published Oct. 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes “a missing law of nature” that recognizes for the first time an important norm within the natural world’s workings. The new law states that complex natural systems evolve to states of greater patterning, diversity and complexity.

“This was a true collaboration between scientists and philosophers to address one of the most profound mysteries of the cosmos: why do complex systems, including life, evolve toward greater functional information over time?” said co-author Jonathan Lunine, the David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences and chair of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Over the past few decades, it has become quite obvious that humans are not the only living organisms with intelligence.

The story of intelligence you are about to experience goes back 13.8 billion years, back to the moment the universe was born: the Big Bang. It’s a story of time and space, matter and energy. It is a story of unfolding, It’s the story of how the very nature of the physical universe from its very inception led to the universe getting to know itself and eventually, to reflect.

Continue reading “Complexity, Evolution And Intelligence” »

Test images showcase how XRISM will explore the universe’s evolution and the structure of spacetime.

The cultural forces that fueled our success now threaten to end it.

The authors evolved antibiotic-resistant Helicobacter pylori in the absence of antibiotics and presence of DNA from antibiotic-sensitive strains. Horizontal gene transfer mediated the molecular reverse evolution of the antibiotic-resistance gene to the antibiotic-sensitive allele, and the authors used theoretical modelling to determine the evolutionary conditions that promote reverse evolution.

New research challenges the long-held idea that evolution is always random, and could have massive implications for addressing real-world issues.

A new study reveals that magnetic fields are common in star systems with large blue stars, challenging prior beliefs and providing insights into the evolution and explosive nature of these massive stars.

Astronomers from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and the MIT Kavli Institute and Department of Physics have discovered that magnetic fields in multiple star systems with at least one giant, hot blue star, are much more common than previously thought by scientists. The results significantly improve the understanding of massive stars and their role as progenitors of supernova explosions.

Characteristics of O-type Stars.