Exobiology

Looking for life on Saturn's largest moon Titan may be trickier than first thought. New computer simulations suggest that if life exists, there may not be a lot of it about. In fact, the mass probably wouldn't amount to much of anything at all.

The question of whether life once existed on Mars may be answered by a new laser instrument from the University of Bern. The device can be carried by a rover to zap samples of the Red Planet to see if they contain traces of microfossils.

A new discovery has boosted the chances of life soon being found on another world. NASA has announced the detection of phosphorus, the rarest element that’s essential to life, in the oceans of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

An international team of scientists is conducting the experiments designed for NASA's Perseverance Mars rover here on Earth. The purpose is to provide a baseline with which to compare the data returned from the Red Planet.

New research from a team led by MIT's Clara Sousa-Silva suggests that ET might be rather odorous. The scientists determined that phosphine – an extremely foul gas – could be a sign of oxygen-averse life on other planets beyond the solar system.

To gain a better understanding of how life might have arisen on Earth and other planets, a NASA team led by astrobiologist Laurie Barge recreated the conditions in the vicinity of hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean four billion years ago.

Algae found in a candy-pink Spanish lagoon is giving scientists hope that life could or may once have existed on Mars. Dunaliella salina EP-1, from the Laguna de Peña Hueca in La Mancha, lives in high salt and sulfur concentrations similar to those found at the buried lake at the Martian ice cap.

Is Mars too dry support life? To find out, NASA sent a team from the Ames Research Center to the Atacama Desert in Chile to identify the limit is that divides the point where microorganisms can live, and where the best they can hope for is very temporary survival, and where Mars lands on this scale.

Europa is regarded as one of the most likely places in the solar system to find life, but where to look for evidence of it? To aid future space missions, a team has drawn up comprehensive maps of the radiation bombarding the moon to determine where explorers must look to find signs of life.

Today, the Moon is as dead as you can get, but scientists contend that this might not have been the case billions of years ago. There were two periods shortly after the Moon formed when it could have been possible for life to have existed on the lunar surface.

We may be more alone in the Universe than we realize. According to Cardiff University astronomers, the chemical element phosphorus is abundant on Earth, but may be very rare outside of our Solar System. Because phosphorus is essential to life, it's rarity may mean that life may be equally rare.

To find out what life might be like on a TRAPPIST planet, we contacted Lisa Kaltenegger and Jack O'Malley-James at the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University and asked them One Big Question: "What could life in the TRAPPIST-1 system be like?"​